


What We Are in the Dark

by animeangelriku



Category: Glee RPF
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Domestic Fluff, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Lots of tears, M/M, Self-Discovery, Self-conscious about sexuality, Soul Mate AU, True Love's Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 08:45:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7750969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animeangelriku/pseuds/animeangelriku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where soul-marks determine who you'll spend the rest of your life with, Chris Colfer finally meets his soul mate, Darren Criss, after years of assuming he was meant to be alone. For some reason, they can't seem to be the happy couple they're supposed to be, and Chris is further convinced that the universe made a mistake in bringing them together. But Darren is willing to make things work between them, and his reluctance to give up may just be what drives Chris to start trying, too—despite his better judgment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What We Are in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the CrissColfer Big Bang! Thank you so much to my beta Bee, who was the voice of reason in my head through this entire thing. Thank you so much to my second beta, Emelie, who took on the challenge of going over this at the very last minute. And finally, thank you so much to Victoria, who was an amazing artist to work with and who always gave me the confidence I needed to finish this. I seriously couldn't have done it without all of you!

In hindsight, Chris really should have not walked into that Starbucks. 

He felt odd as soon as he pulled the door open. Out of his skin almost, like he shouldn’t be there. Like he somehow knew a meteor was going to crash through the roof and kill him, or leave him in a permanent coma, or maybe something worse. But his coffee machine had broken down and Chris couldn’t make it through the day—not even through the first _hours_ of the day—without his dose of coffee. So he took a deep breath, trying to push his soul back into his body, and made his way to the end of the line.

There were only two girls in front of him when his left arm started burning. Chris screamed before he was able to bite down on his lip, but everyone at Starbucks had already heard him. 

Suddenly Chris was surrounded by concerned passersby, feeling like he couldn’t breathe, like his arm was literally on fire, like his skin had been set aflame and nothing in the world could stop the pain. The world was spinning, his lungs were shrinking, his legs were trembling and his entire body… he was being torn apart. There were voices all around him, but Chris couldn’t make out more than a few words, and they didn’t seem to make sense. 

“… mark?” someone asked him, a voice that was stronger and louder than the others, which were softly diminishing, one by one. The pain seemed to dissipate at an agonizingly slow pace, like the smoke out of a cigarette, but still dissipating nonetheless. A woman was holding his shoulder, and her other hand was barely grazing Chris’ clutching his burning arm. 

“Sweetie,” she said, as if she’d had to repeat the word several times. “Is that your soul-mark?”

Chris looked down at his arm. He pulled his hand away and saw words written on his skin, and having words written on him didn’t surprise him, not at all, it wasn’t the first time he found someone else’s handwriting on a part of his body, as noticeable as if he himself had done it. 

But these words seemed to be… _carved_ into his skin.

_Charlie  
(0152) (686) 563-9_

“Is that your soul-mark?” the woman asked again. 

Chris took another deep breath, doing his best to pull himself together. 

“Y-yes,” he said, embarrassed. Ashamed. He and the woman were in the middle of a circle of people that reminded Chris of a prayer circle. He wanted everyone to go away and leave him alone. This was embarrassing enough without having a crowd of onlookers gawking incredulously at him. 

Before Chris could say that while everyone’s concern for him was really touching, he was fine, the skin of his arm where his soul-mark was written began to glow a light blue, kind of like a ghostly flame. The spectators around him stepped back, as if the flame was contagious, and they all started looking around, murmuring and whispering between them. The woman next to Chris helped him get to his feet. 

Then he saw him. 

There was really nothing extraordinary about the man. He was wearing a white shirt, jeans, brown shoes, and a leather cuff on his left wrist, with another cuff, thinner than the leather one, on his right wrist. He had black curls and barely noticeable stubble on his chin. He was also holding a pen on his right hand, and his left arm was held out to his side, just a little bit away from his body. Chris never would’ve thought anything of a guy like him, no matter where he saw him. He was just another Starbucks customer, who stood beside the chair he had been sitting on. 

Except for the fact that the man’s eyes—a hazel shade of brown, or maybe they were more honey-colored, or even darker, probably depending on the light—were fixated on his own, and Chris could see them from across the room as if he were standing a foot in front of them. 

He didn’t know how he knew, or why he was so sure, but Chris was entirely, completely, absolutely positive that the guy whose eyes he was staring into was his soul mate. 

And Chris cursed him with everything he had. 

Anger pooled in his chest, along with despair, hopelessness, and something resembling disappointment, though he did his best to ignore the latter. A knot on his throat kept him from swallowing. He wondered if his nostrils would suddenly block and stop him from getting the air he needed to continue living. He wanted his entire being to shut down. It would be better than whatever event that would unfold next. 

Almost as if on cue, the man’s left arm also started to glow the same ghostly blue flame as Chris’, which didn’t seem to hurt the guy or even catch him by surprise. He started walking towards Chris and Chris found himself doing the same, though not through any conscious decision of his own. He tried to regain control of his legs, to push himself as far away from this black-haired stranger as he could, but it was like he was being pulled by a magnet in his stomach, forcing him to move closer to the man with a matching glowing arm. 

Chris wanted to stomp his feet and yell and curse every single one of the spectators around them. _Do something!_ he tried to scream. _Stop this from happening! This is madness!_ But he couldn’t open his mouth or even turn to look at anyone else, and he wanted to cry, he did, he could feel tears behind his eyes and words filled with rage on the tip of his tongue. 

He couldn’t stop this. He was powerless. And he _loathed_ it. 

Was it really happening? In a goddamn Starbucks, of all places? Not like he had ever imagined it happening, but now that it was, a Starbucks made it seem so… mundane, even for Chris’ cynicism and nonexistent expectations. The least the universe could do for him was to give him something more memorable than a fucking corporate coffee shop. 

The moment Chris and the stranger were face to face, with a gap of less than a foot between them, the magnetic pull on his stomach faded away. But there was no point in running away anymore. Everyone had seen them—had seen _it._

Chris’ skin was prickling, he could feel the hairs on his arms stand, he was shivering and sweating at the same time; it wasn’t as pleasant as everyone had told him it would be. He didn’t suddenly feel like everything was right in the world, nor did he hear the birds outside chirping in sync to the beat of his heart, nor did he think that a missing part of himself had finally found its place within him. 

Then the flames on his and the stranger’s arms went out, snuffed by a breeze only they felt. 

And it was done. 

“Hi.” 

His soul mate’s voice was infuriatingly beautiful; soft and smooth at once, the water of a stream over rocks, the warm breeze of spring over bright leaves and blossoming flowers, the loving hand of a parent affectionately petting their child’s hair. 

Chris hated it already. 

His soul mate switched the pen to his left hand and held out his right hand, never breaking the eye contact between them, no matter how much Chris wished he did. “I’m Darren.”

Chris’ arm moved on its own free will, and as soon as their hands touched, electricity coursed through Chris’ whole body, making him feel like he had just signed a deal with the devil. 

“Chris,” he said through gritted teeth. 

He suddenly remembered the only soul mate reunion he had ever witnessed, back when he was twelve—or was he thirteen? No, he was definitely twelve. It was in the park a few blocks away from school; Chris had been playing with Hannah in the sandbox, building castles and borders between kingdoms, when he felt the urge to turn his head towards a girl and a boy who were embracing and crying… joyfully? They pulled away from each other and ran their hands all over each other, as if they were making sure the other one was real. 

“You see that, kids?” Chris’ father, who had been watching over his children from a bench, pointed to the couple. “That, right there, is a soul mate reunion.” 

Chris’ eyes widened. He couldn’t believe he was witnessing a soul mate reunion with his very eyes! The couple seemed so happy, so joyous, so _relieved_ —they looked as though they had been waiting decades to find each other and were having trouble believing they finally had. 

Parents who were already leaving with their children swarmed the couple, congratulating them and clapping for them and patting them on the back like they were all old friends. Chris recalled hearing them ask the new soul mates, “Had you ever had any kind of impression of each other?”

The boy abashedly shook his head, but the girl excitedly nodded hers, saying, “I once had a dream where I saw the blurry figure of a boy, like I was seeing him through a waterfall. I figured it was just a dream, but it was him, it was you, it was _you_!” She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth, not caring about the crowd surrounding them in the slightest. Chris remembered blushing, wanting to look away—he suddenly felt like he was barging in on a private moment—but he couldn’t. The soul mates had a magnetic pull on everyone close enough to see them. 

Another parent asked, “How do you feel?”

The soul mates looked at each other, and they giggled and leaned closer and rested their heads together. Chris recalled wondering if they could _physically_ break away from each other or if they were stuck like that until the glee of their meeting wore off. 

“Like,” the boy said, sighing happily. “Like I was already in love with her.”

Chris had never forgotten those words—something about the way the boy said them, like they hadn’t come from him but from someone else, from something so much greater than him. 

_Like I was already in love._

But none of that happened to Chris. Or to Darren, from what Chris could gather. He didn’t feel like he had already been in love with a person who may or may not exist, for all he knew, and even now that he was just within arm’s reach, Chris didn’t have the certainty of someone who knew he was in love with the man in front of him. 

And, really, he wasn’t expecting to, anyway.

He felt trapped, as if this stranger had stolen him from his life and thrown him in a cage only big enough to move around it. He felt airborne, with no feet to stand on, no solid ground to keep him from falling into the abyss. 

Darren opened his mouth to say something, and Chris wanted to cover it with a napkin before he could speak a word. 

“So, um,” he began, staring down at the floor. He looked at his arm, at the numbers he had written on his skin, the ones that had been somehow carved into Chris’. Chris couldn’t help but do the same, and now that he could see his soul-mark properly, he could’ve sworn he heard the universe laughing at him. Not only had he met his soul mate on a Starbucks, no, no, no; to add insult to injury, the mark that had brought them together at last was what seemed to be half a phone number. It hadn’t even been something interesting or funny or semi-romantic in the slightest, like the stories Chris had spent most of his teenage years reading online. 

A fucking Starbucks and a fucking phone number. 

Darren at least had the decency to look ashamed once he realized the same thing. 

“I guess… I guess we go to the city hall now?” he asked sheepishly, his gaze shifting from Chris to his arm to the ground and back to Chris. 

Chris shrugged, not in the mood to say anything himself. What else could he say? What else could they do, anyway? 

Their one-sided conversation seemed to break some sort of spell. The crowd of spectators around them, who had been completely silent since the moment their eyes met across the coffee shop, finally scattered. 

It was only then that Chris realized Darren hadn’t come into the Starbucks alone. The chair Darren had been standing next to when they first saw each other was now occupied by a dark-haired girl with her phone in one hand and a coffee in the other one, calmly drinking from it. She glanced at Chris and smiled politely; then she turned to Darren, and she raised both eyebrows at him. 

“I just—” Darren smiled nervously at Chris. He started gesturing with his hands, apparently having trouble speaking at the moment, though Chris still didn’t understand what he was trying to say. 

“I’ll be right back,” Darren finished. With more hand-gesturing, he quickly made his way to his companion, keeping his left arm nearly glued to his side. Chris heard him hiss at the girl, “ _Please_ tell me you weren’t recording!” before he lowered his voice. 

Oh, great. Just what he needed: for the entire world to find out about the soul mates with the freakish skin-carving soul-marks from New York through a video. God, what was he going to tell his parents? If the girl had actually recorded their… _reunion_ , it would only be a matter of time before his phone rang with a call from his dad, a call from his sister, and several calls from his mother. Then she’d start sending him text messages and then she’d call him again and Chris would eventually have to answer her. 

Darren walked back to him, groaning. 

“I’m sorry,” he told Chris, his hand on the nape of his neck. “She, uh, she _did_ record the, um, ‘moment’,” Darren said, using air quotes, “but she promised she wouldn’t upload it anywhere. She asked me if we wanted her to delete it—”

Oh, god, he was already talking about them like they were a couple. 

“—and I told her I’d ask you—”

“She can delete it,” Chris said. He looked at the girl, who was staring at him as if he were an extinct animal, a creature that shouldn’t exist. She glanced away as soon as Chris caught her staring, focusing on her phone instead. “I don’t want to see the video.”

“Oh. Um, okay.” Darren nodded. He made a gesture that Chris guessed meant, _Be right back_ , because he hurried off towards his friend. He had asked Chris what he wanted to do with the video of their reunion, yet he never mentioned what he thought of it. Surely Darren wasn’t planning to keep it, right? It was common—even normal, in a way—for soul mates to want to keep a memento of their first meeting, to tell their children about how they had met, or to simply have it in their home as the beginning of their history together or something along those lines. Chris’ parents had found each other in a bookstore, and to this day, they kept the receipt of the book they had both reached for at the same time over a shelf in the living room. 

But so far, Darren’s body language had shown Chris he wasn’t any happier about this turn of events than him. At least, that’s how Chris interpreted it. 

Darren walked back towards him, and Chris couldn’t help but notice that he was still holding the pen in his hand. Why was he still holding it? 

“So, uh…” Darren cleared his throat. “Shall we go?” He held his hand out, his palm facing up, to which Chris raised an eyebrow. 

“Seriously?” he said. Darren blushed in embarrassment and dropped his hand. It wasn’t that Chris didn’t appreciate politeness or… chivalry, but he wasn’t going to hold hands with a complete stranger just because their arms had lit up with blue flames. It didn’t matter that the universe had decided they were somehow perfect for each other, Chris didn’t know anything about Darren other than his name. 

When they got to the door, Darren held it open for him and then hurried to catch up with him.

Having someone walk beside him was… quite an unpleasant sensation. Chris had grown up used to it—as soon as Hannah was old enough, his parents had always made them walk side by side wherever they went—but he’d been aware that it wouldn’t last forever. Soon he and his sister would go their separate ways and Chris would be able to freely move through his life. But now he had a soul mate attached to his hip for the rest of this lifetime, and he didn’t know if he’d ever get used to _that_ idea.

He wondered what would’ve happened if his coffee machine hadn’t broken down, or if he’d just skipped on his morning coffee today. Then he realized that his soul-mark had appeared before he could buy anything. He hadn’t gotten his coffee anyway.

Chris couldn’t help but groan out loud, pinching the bridge of his nose and waving Darren off when he asked, “Oh, hey, you okay?” with an _I’m fine._

But he _wasn’t_ fine, because the universe definitely hated him and it was probably laughing at him right now, mocking him behind his back like a spoiled child. 

*

Chris Colfer was almost eleven years old when his parents sat him down and told him about soul-marks.

He was supposed to learn about them the next year, in school, but apparently… apparently he ought to have some sort of mark by now and he… didn’t.

He could still remember the expressions both his mom and dad wore on their faces when they asked him to take a seat at the dining table. At first, Chris was scared that he’d done something wrong, or that the school counselor had turned him in (again) for spending his entire time daydreaming about fairy tale characters, or that they’d found the dent he had accidentally made on the table with his sai swords. _Accidentally._ Sure, all right, they had both warned him not to use those swords indoors, but how was he supposed to know that he was strong enough to make a dent on the table?

“Look,” Chris began, “I swear I didn’t mean—”

But his father cut him off with a look Chris had never seen before. His dad glanced at his mom, and they both seemed incredibly uncomfortable; it was exactly how Chris looked when Hannah invited him to one of her tea parties. He felt even more uncomfortable now, seeing his parents like that.

It suddenly dawned on him that maybe this little family powwow wasn’t about something he had done. Maybe it had something to do with the way some kids talked about him behind his back, the way some of them pointed at him and giggled, the way they stared at him like something was unmistakably wrong with him, the way they had been acting towards him for nearly three weeks.

Maybe… maybe it was about something Chris simply _was._

“Sweetie,” his mom said, and Chris immediately knew that whatever this was, it couldn’t be anything good; she always called him _sweetie_ or _honey_ when she was going to deliver bad news. “During the last parent-teacher meeting, Ms. Harper mentioned that you asked her what a soul-mark is.”

There it was.

Yes, Chris remembered that, though he had done his best to forget it.

One morning, before Ms. Harper arrived, a girl from his class named Lisa had come in, bouncing on her feet and yelling about finally getting her “soul-mark.” She was the only one in her family who hadn’t gotten her soul-mark, she said, until that morning. Her friends all surrounded her, along with most of the children present, as she showed off a name engraved on the inside of her arm like one of those tattoos sometimes found on bags of chips. They all started chattering excitedly, and Chris would’ve joined them if he hadn’t been doing a very important drawing of a sword-wielding Goldilocks. He wanted to finish it before he forgot how it looked in his head. What was so cool about a name written on your arm, anyway?

“Chris, Chris!” Lisa cried. “What’s your soul-mark?”

Chris was slightly taken by surprise by her question. Lisa had never paid him much attention before. “Um,” he stuttered, not knowing what to answer. He’d never heard of a “soul-mark,” how was he supposed to know what his was? Was it like a birthmark? He didn’t have one of those, but he had always wanted one. Then again, Lisa had just gotten her soul-mark, so it probably wasn’t a birthmark…

“Mine is on my chest!” said Karla. “It says ‘Whoa, gorgeous, are you okay?’”

“You have a sentence, too?” asked Leo, smiling to himself. “I have one on my back! I don’t know what it says, though… my mom doesn’t want to tell me ‘cause she says that ruins the surprise!”

“I have a name like Lisa!” added Jamie, showing the name written on his right wrist. “My entire family has them. Mom says it’s a tradition!”

“Soul-marks aren’t a tradition, dummy!” Lisa said with her hands on her hips.

Another girl, Kylie, joined the conversation. “But my family’s got them, too! Even my little brother! I don’t have one yet, but Dad says it’ll show up any day now!”

At this point, Chris was inspecting what he could see of his arms and legs. He didn’t know what a “soul-mark” was, or why so many of his classmates had them. Was he supposed to have a name or a sentence or something else written on his skin? Maybe he could ask his mom to write something on his back, or on his leg! Or on his shoulder!

“So, Chris,” said Lisa, her attention back on him. “What’s your soul-mark?”

The children who had been gathered around Lisa were looking at him now, and Chris started panicking. He felt so… self-conscious, being stared at by everyone in his classroom, especially because they rarely turned their heads in his direction. He could lie and say that he had a super cool sentence written somewhere on his body, but what if someone asked to see it? What was he going to do then? Maybe he could make something up… but if he told them he had something that wasn’t a soul-mark, they’d all laugh at him and call him a liar and—

“I…” He swallowed, clearing his suddenly dry throat. “I, um… I… don’t know?”

Chris would never forget the way the expressions on his classmates’ faces changed. He would never forget how they turned to look at each other, how they pitifully stared at him, how Lisa and Karla and Leo and Jamie and Kylie and everyone else smiled at him like they didn’t know what else to do, like they couldn’t do anything else because there was nothing left to do for him.

“W-well,” Kylie stammered. “That’s okay, Chris. Yours is gonna show up soon, too, you’ll see!”

Chris managed a tiny smile, more for her sake than for his own, but a sense of dread had his chest on a tight grip. Why did he _not_ know what a soul-mark was when everyone else _did_? Had he missed something in class? Had he been absent from a birthday party where the big secret was revealed to everyone but him?

That day, instead of imagining Red Riding Hood as a queen or a forest full of trolls, he stared at his wrists, at the naked skin of his arms, and wondered why there was nothing written on them.

Had he _done_ something wrong?

Maybe this was like Christmas; if he behaved a certain way for a certain amount of time, he’d wake up one day with a soul-mark, and he’d be able to tell his classmates what it was and show it to them and they would all think he had the coolest soul-mark in Ms. Harper’s class and they would never ever _ever_ look at him the way they all had again.

At the end of the school day, before his dad picked him up, Chris shyly approached Ms. Harper’s desk. She was putting her papers inside her bag, so he had to knock on her desk to get her attention.

“Ms. Harper?”

“Yes, Chris?” she asked him, sitting down so she was at eye-level with him.

Chris liked Ms. Harper. She was nice and kind and sweet, and she didn’t treat her students as if they were idiots and she had to explain every single little thing to them. She was the only teacher Chris felt he could go to if he didn’t understand something. He knew she wouldn’t judge him or laugh at him, yet the words he wanted to say got stuck in his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to say them. Every time he opened his mouth, the faces of his classmates flashed before his eyes: those woeful smiles, those pitiful stares…

“Chris?” Ms. Harper prompted.

“What’s a soul-mark?”

Ms. Harper went pale. For a second, Chris was afraid that he’d asked her something he shouldn’t have. Maybe “soul-mark” was a bad word and that was why he didn’t know what it was—but everyone else had used it so freely and casually. What was so bad about it that Ms. Harper still hadn’t answered him? 

She breathed deeply and sighed through her nose. “Oh, Chris,” she said. “You should really ask your parents that, dear. We’ll talk about them next year, so you guys can get the answers to any questions you might have, but your mom and dad should go over the basics with you first, okay?”

“Okay,” Chris nodded, doing his best to keep the disappointment out of his voice, even though a part of him knew he shouldn’t be disappointed. If Ms. Harper had told him it was better this way, then it was better this way. There was nothing wrong in asking his parents. The worst thing they could do was roll their eyes at him, or maybe Dad would snort and Mom would smack his shoulder and glare at him. Chris could wait until his father picked him up to get the answers he needed. Everything was going to be fine.

But the second he climbed on the backseat of his dad’s car and he heard him ask, “Hey, buddy, how was your day?” Chris froze. He had rehearsed what he was going to say in his head over and over and over during the ten minutes it took Dad to arrive, but now he… he couldn’t say it. His classmates’ expressions were right there, lingering in the back of his mind, and now Ms. Harper’s pale face accompanied them as well.

He couldn’t do it.

“Great, Dad,” Chris said, smiling at his father through the rearview mirror.

He couldn’t do it.

And now Mom and Dad were in front of him and they were probably angry and all Chris could do was sit there, under their gazes, and mutter, “Yeah, I did.” There was no point in lying to them when they already knew the truth.

“She also said she told you to ask us instead,” Dad added.

Chris nodded his head.

“So why didn’t you ask us?” His mom sat down next to him and put her hand on his shoulder and Chris glanced away from her—because if he looked her in the eyes, she would find out what had made him stay silent and Chris couldn’t bear to talk about it. He couldn’t stand the thought of telling them how everyone had reacted when he confessed he didn’t know what a soul-mark was.

So he simply shrugged and let his parents think whatever they wanted to think. 

For a few seconds, neither of them said a word or made any sound. Chris hated these moments of silence, they were so much worse than getting scolded or yelled at, because at least there was some kind of noise that he could tune out. Being left alone with his thoughts—with nothing else to focus on—was always bad. He wanted to say something just so his parents would have a lead to start a new conversation, but he couldn’t think of anything. 

As it turned out, he didn’t need to. Mom had always been particularly good at reading him, even if he thought she couldn’t just because he was looking away from her. 

She turned around and pulled her hair away from her neck. On her nape, just above her back, there was a name written in what Chris could only guess was skin-colored marker: his dad’s name, barely noticeable but there all the same.

“Do you see it?” Mom asked him. Chris nodded, completely mesmerized by what he was looking at. He softly touched her neck, where Dad’s name was, and he could feel that it was kind of bumpy, like a scar, but it was still part of Mom’s neck. It was still part of her.

“Is this your soul-mark?” Chris asked her. She turned back to him with a smile that erased all of his worries, even for just a moment. Why had he been so afraid to talk to them about this? What did his classmates matter when Mom was smiling at him like that, when Dad was looking at him with the most patient glance Chris had ever seen?

His father lifted the sleeve of his shirt to reveal the skin of his shoulder, where he wore a scar in the shape of his mother’s name, exactly like the one she had on her neck.

“A soul-mark,” Dad began while Chris gently pressed his fingers to the letters engraved on his dad’s shoulder, “is any kind of mark that tells you who your soul mate will be.”

“Having their name on any part of your body is one of the most common,” his mom said. “When soul mates finally meet each other, their marks will scar, in case it’s a type of skin-mark.”

“So,” Chris questioned, “not all soul-marks are skin-marks?”

“Just some of them,” she answered, “but there are many different kinds of marks. Your cousin Jonathan, for instance, could only see certain colors, and when he met his soul mate, he started seeing the colors he hadn’t been able to before.”

Chris couldn’t help, once again, staring at the bare skin of his limbs; inspecting them exactly the way he had at school the morning Lisa started this mess. 

“What kind of soul-mark am I going to have?” he asked. It was certainly not going to be any color-related mark, he had no trouble whatsoever seeing colors. He remembered Jamie and Kylie mentioning that their entire families had skin-marks, so did that mean he would have a name written on him, just like his parents?

“We can’t know for sure until it appears,” his dad answered.

“And when’s it going to appear?” Chris wondered. He tried not to sound impatient, but the memory of his classmates proudly showing off and talking about their soul-marks was still fresh in his mind. He seemed to be the only kid in his class who was still waiting for his mark. Well, Kylie was still waiting, too, but at least she knew what to expect.

His parents glanced at each other again, and he didn’t like _that_ look any more than he’d liked the one his father had given him when they had sat him down at the table.

“It probably won’t be long now,” Mom responded. She hadn’t called him _sweetie_ or _honey_ , but her tone hadn’t precisely meant good news, either. “Usually soul-marks appear by the age of ten, but a lot of people get theirs after turning twelve.”

Oh. Okay. Okay, Chris was eleven now. He still had a whole year. And when his soul-mark finally showed up, he’d be able to parade around his class and show it off to all the kids who had laughed at him, who had pointed at him, who had whispered behind his back thinking that he couldn’t hear the names they called him and the insults they hurled at him. He would show them.

He would show them all. 

*

“Names.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Darren glance at him from the chair he was sitting on. Once again, he appreciated the chivalry, but he wasn’t going to go first. His silence was enough of an answer for Darren, who turned back to the woman behind the computer with a sigh.

“Darren Everett Criss.”

 _Everett,_ Chris thought. _I’d never met anyone called Everett. A bit of an old name, really._

The office they had been called into was too small for Chris’ liking, but he supposed the woman (she hadn’t exactly introduced herself to them and he couldn’t read her nametag) was used to it. It definitely beat working in a tiny cubicle, with floppy walls that were a poor solution to privacy and personal space issues. At least this small office was full of little details that kept Chris distracted: the ceramic knight figurine on the woman’s desk, the papier-mâché hummingbird hanging from the light bulb chord, the traveling magazines hidden amongst the dusty textbooks on the bookshelf near the wall, the sound of the computer’s mouse as the woman clicked on this and that, the clacking of the keys as she typed Darren’s name… 

Chris leaned further back against the window and closed his eyes. It was better than looking at the fucking incomplete phone number on his arm. 

It was better than having to accept that this was actually happening.

“Name?” the woman asked him.

Oh, good, his ten seconds of pretending he was still free had ended.

“Christopher Paul Colfer,” he begrudgingly answered, still leaning back against the window. The _click-clack_ of the keys continued—God, what an annoyingly _loud_ keyboard—as the woman typed his name into the computer. Then she continued typing without saying any other word to the two men in her office. What was she going to do now? Did she have to pull their names from some sort of _single people_ database into a _soul mate_ database or something? Chris kind of wished he had been taught about the legal process of soul mate bindings in school, or that he had been smart enough to ask about it. He only knew that they would be given some sort of “home” in—Queens, was it? Last time he’d checked, Utopia Parkway was where newly found soul mates were sent to live in New York. 

“Paul?”

Chris allowed his head to drop forward. Darren was half-turned towards him in his chair, which couldn’t possibly be a comfortable position. He was smiling a little, though, with the corners of his mouth perked up in what seemed to be the beginning of a grin. He was also looking at Chris like he expected an answer to a question Chris hadn’t paid attention to.

“I’m sorry?” 

“Your middle name is Paul?” Darren asked.

Chris had never been a fan of his middle name—he had once, _jokingly_ , told his parents he would’ve liked a middle name that started with a C, just because it would make his full name easier to remember, albeit a bit of an annoyance, phonetically speaking—but now he felt… self-conscious about it. A bit embarrassed, to be honest.

“Oh, like _you’re_ one to talk, Mr. _Everett_ Criss,” he retorted. Only after he had said it, and after he had heard the choked snort Darren had managed to hold back, did he realize how infantile his retort had been. 

Darren defensively raised his arms in the air, and his smile faded. “Hey, I didn’t mean it as an insult,” he said. “It’s just something else I’m learning about you.”

Chris wasn’t entirely sure of what to say to that. 

“You know,” Darren went on. “An hour ago, I didn’t know your middle name, and now I do!” He let out a nervous chuckle while Chris was still trying to comprehend how knowing his middle name could possibly be that exciting. Darren’s gaze shifted to the carpeted floor underneath them. “Christopher Paul Colfer.” 

A shiver ran over Chris’ entire body, from his toes all the way up to the top of his head and then back down. He could feel tension all around him, as though it were another layer of the air he was breathing. His face was so hot, it made him slightly dizzy, and he had to lean further back against the window to support himself. His fingers curled into fists. His arms were firm at his sides. His ears were ringing, buzzing. He wondered if either of the two other occupants of the room could hear his teeth grinding. 

Everyone had always gone on and on and on about what it felt like when you finally found your soul mate, when you finally _saw_ them, when your eyes met at last and suddenly the world was just so small in comparison—but no one had ever told him how it felt like the first time your soul mate said your name, and Chris wasn’t ready for it. 

Darren’s voice had almost driven him crazy when he’d heard it back at the Starbucks, but now… Now Chris didn’t know whether he wanted to hear it over and over again or cut his ears off so he never had to. 

The particular combination of letters that formed Chris’ full name sounded like… like… He couldn’t even _describe_ it—his name on Darren’s lips, on Darren’s _voice_ , sounded like a secret or a mantra, like something that should only be said in a room where no one except them could hear it, like it was too important to go around saying it just because. No, not like it was too important—like it was too _precious_. It was the song people cried in mass; the comforting murmuring in children’s ears after a nightmare; the whispered words exchanged during a stormy night, during a calm, quiet night, the whispered words that were sometimes the loudest sound in the room; the whispered words that went silent once sleep took over but were still there when morning came. 

It sounded as if his name no longer belonged to only him, but to Darren as well.

It was absolutely nerve-wracking. 

“It suits you,” Darren said, breaking the spell he’d cast on Chris. 

“How does it suit me, exactly?” Chris questioned. He still felt a little dizzy and the ringing hadn’t completely left his ears yet, but he did his best not to let any of it show. Crossing his arms seemed to be a good way of pretending he was no worse for wear. 

Darren shrugged his shoulders. “It just does.” 

“Okay,” said the woman behind the computer, completely oblivious to the exchange that had just occurred. She leaned forward in her desk, and now Chris could read her nametag: Mrs. Sandra Williams. “First things first: before you can be moved to your new residency, you both need to sign a soul mate certificate.”

“Isn’t that the same thing as a marriage certificate?” Darren asked.

“Not quite,” answered Mrs. Williams. “It used to be the same thing, but a few generations back, we started getting soul mates who were underage, and the parents always came in and made a fuss and so the papers were separated. It’s really just one more document you need to sign if you want to get married.”

Chris was pretty sure his great-grandparents had been part of that last generation, because his grandparents had met when they were sixteen and gotten married when they were twenty-one. He used to love hearing that story whenever his grandma visited them. 

“So, we sign the certificate and then what, two bodyguards come in and drive us to our new apartment in Queens?” Chris spat. Mrs. Williams—who certainly didn’t deserve to be the target of Chris’ pent up frustration—didn’t seem fazed in the slightest, but Chris caught sight of Darren sinking in his chair. 

“Manhattan,” she replied. “The residential complexes for soul mates in Utopia Parkway were completely occupied two years ago. You’ll be picked up from your current residencies tomorrow morning and escorted to a _house_ in Fifth Avenue. You don’t need to immediately move into your new home, but it is recommended you do it as soon as possible.”

Why did they have to be escorted like they were children? Couldn’t they just be told the address and meet there on their own? 

_Then again,_ Chris thought, _at this point, other soul mates probably wouldn’t want to be even a minute away from each other._

“I’ll go get your certificate,” said Mrs. Williams. She stood up from the desk and walked out of the office, leaving the two soul mates alone again. 

Darren immediately turned to look at Chris, and Chris felt the urge to cut him off before he began—but he had already been rude enough for the day. He might as well try to be _civil_ to the guy he was supposed to spend the rest of his life with; besides, the semi-permanent scowl on his face was going to start tiring him out eventually. 

“So,” Darren said. He slid his hand inside his pocket and brought out the pen he had used to write the phone number that was now permanently branded on Chris’ name. “Christopher Paul Colfer.”

Another shiver ran down Chris’ spine, although he wasn’t as affected by it as he had been the first time. “We’ve already established that’s my full name.”

“No, I know. I just like saying it.”

Chris wrapped his arms around himself. He had never felt so defensive over his _own name._ “Why?”

“I just do,” Darren insisted, twirling the pen on his fingers. “It sounds so… _regal_.” 

“No, it doesn’t.”

“You only think that because you’ve grown up with it!”

“I think you’re the _only_ person who’s ever thought my name sounds regal.”

“I bet that’s not true.”

“Oh, yeah?” Chris scoffed. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because I have common sense?” Darren answered, glancing around the room as if he couldn’t believe that Chris wasn’t following his… very peculiar train of thought. “C’mon, I bet that every single person who has heard your full name—not just ‘Chris’ or ‘Chris Colfer’—has thought it sounded as legit as a name can get.” 

Chris thought of several ways he could easily contradict that statement, but what was the point? These few minutes had shown him that Darren wasn’t someone he could reason with using logic, and logic was pretty much all Chris had. So he resigned himself to sigh in defeat and mumble, “You’re crazy.”

“So I’ve been told,” was Darren’s reply. He was grinning like a five-year-old who had just beaten an older sibling in a staring contest—he looked so energetic, so comfortable, so different to the awkward mess he’d been when they had both walked into Mrs. Williams’ office, that Chris smiled despite himself, turning his head to the window to hide it. 

Of course, Darren saw it and immediately pointed to it. “Aha! I made you smile!” he cried. Chris bit the inside of his cheek, though he knew it was completely useless. 

Mrs. Williams came back with the soul mate certificate a couple minutes later. This time, when Darren offered him the pen in his hand to be the first one to sign the paper before them, Chris accepted the chivalrous gesture. There was no use in delaying the inevitable, so he might as well do this with grace. 

*

Chris and Darren left the city hall right after signing their soul mate certificate. They stood outside the building, side by side, avoiding all kind of contact between them. 

Chris heard Darren inhale sharply through his nose and loudly exhale through his mouth. “So,” Darren muttered. “I guess that’s it, then?”

“I guess so,” Chris shrugged. It was… unnerving, in a way, knowing that he was now _bound_ to someone, and there was actually a legal document that could prove it. It wasn’t that big of a deal—marriage certificates were mostly the same thing, except that those were rendered useless once a divorce was filed. Soul mate certificates weren’t that easy to get rid of. 

Darren looked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t know what—didn’t know _how_. He was toying with his fingers, jiggling his foot up and down against the concrete beneath them, like whatever words he was trying to say were looking for a way out throughout his whole body. 

Chris didn’t know if he did it as a favor to Darren or simply to be polite, but he held out his hand. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Darren stared at the outstretched hand in front of him. Soul mates shaking hands was an absolutely ridiculous sight—unless it was part of some secret handshake between them—but Chris still wasn’t ready for any kind of physical contact beyond it. Even willingly offering his hand was taking him more courage than he would’ve liked. Darren seemed to read his discomfort somehow, because he quickly shook his hand with Chris’, smiling the whole time. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he echoed. He gave a little nod with his head, and he turned around to begin his way home, his hands held behind his back and a skip on his step. 

For a few seconds, Chris watched him go. He still couldn’t believe this wasn’t some kind of mass hallucination—he actually had a soul mate. He had spent the last six years planning a future in which he was alone, a future in which no one, soul mate or otherwise, wanted to spend the rest of their life with him. And he had been fine with that, really, six years was a long time to grow accustomed to an idea, it was _fine._

Now that idea, along with all the plans he had made to go with it, had been thrown out the window. Now Chris had to adapt to a life where he would always have someone waiting for him at the end of the day. 

With a woeful sigh—there was really nothing else he could do—he turned in the opposite direction and started his way back to the tiny apartment he’d lived in since he was twenty-one. 

The one thing Chris couldn’t stop thinking about, the one thing that absolutely _terrified_ him, was how his family would react when he told them he’d found his soul mate. Would they be happy? Upset? Confused? Most likely relieved, at least a little. His parents would probably think that all the therapists Chris had spent his adolescent years visiting had been worth it, in the end, and Chris wouldn’t have the heart to tell them none of them had actually made any difference. Hannah wouldn’t make much of a fuss, that was for sure, and Chris would be eternally grateful for that. 

He kind of wished he’d brought his earbuds to listen to some music on his way home, but he usually didn’t need them. He liked hearing the busy buzz of the city and gaze at the people who lived in it, even if he had to fight someone for a cab or if someone accidentally elbowed him on the subway, and sometimes he even liked wondering what would’ve happened if he hadn’t moved out of his childhood home in Clovis, California, when he did. It was an interesting scenario to ponder about, if nothing else. 

But the only thoughts that occupied his mind tonight revolved around the events of the day and Darren Everett Criss—his soul mate. He seemed to be a genuinely nice guy, though Chris had known him for less than twenty-four hours. Had he only been nice to Chris because they were supposed to be soul mates, or was he equally nice to everyone? Well, it was something Chris would find out eventually. 

“It’s just something else I’m learning about you,” Darren had said. 

_How curious,_ Chris thought. _Now I kind of understand what he meant._

His apartment was exactly like he had left it in the morning: a mess. His books were still scattered throughout the living room, the dishes on the sink were still dirty, some of his clothes were still piled up on the couch, and the first draft of a novel Chris had been meaning to continue working on for the past three months remained untouched, resting on top of his bedside table, gathering more and more dust as time went on. His reading glasses were right next to the three chapters he had written and printed out. Chris didn’t usually like messy spaces, but he had just been so busy lately that he hadn’t had the time to tidy up—or to work on that first draft he’d abandoned so many months ago. Although the apartment wasn’t actually that much of a disaster, it was a bother to see it all the same. 

None of that mattered now, anyway. He was going to move out of here in a few days, it seemed. Suddenly the mess was almost endearing, some kind of proof that there had been someone living in it for the last two years. 

Chris took his phone out of his pocket to check the time: 4:13 PM. How long had they been at the city hall? He would’ve thought it’d been an hour, maybe an hour and a half, but apparently they’d had to wait a lot longer than that. It hadn’t occurred to him until now, but he had to text Jen to tell her why he hadn’t gone to work today, though he found it a little strange that she hadn’t bombarded him with texts of her own. Whenever he couldn’t go to work—or even if he was two minutes late, sometimes—his phone would _ding_ with a message from his boss. Well, she wasn’t exactly his boss, but it was the best term he could use to describe her. 

Had she figured out why Chris had missed work entirely? What if Darren’s friend hadn’t actually deleted the video of their meeting, and now all of New York City knew about them, including Jen? 

Including his _parents._

Oh, god, he had to call his parents and tell them. 

How would he even start a conversation of such magnitude? What was he even supposed to say? Would it be appropriate to simply call home and hurriedly say he had found his soul mate and then hang up? He could turn off his phone afterwards to avoid any further talk regarding the subject for today. Then again, it was nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow…

No—no, this wasn’t something that could wait any longer. If Chris didn’t do it today, he would continue putting it off until the matter came up in another conversation or his family found out someway else, and he didn’t want to deal with either scenario. He dialed the number of his old home and heard as the phone rang, trying not to rehearse a speech. He hoped the words would come naturally to him when he started talking, but knowing his luck, he was more likely to choke on air.

His father’s voice telling him to leave a message was the most amazing sound Chris had heard today. He waited for the beep of the answering machine before he began speaking. 

“Hey, this is Chris,” he said. “I just called because I, uh… got some pretty big news.” Chris cleared his throat. God, he felt so awkward. Since when had he had this much trouble just leaving a message? “It’s nothing—” 

He considered saying it wasn’t anything _bad,_ but he still wasn’t so sure. The word _serious_ didn’t really fit, either—it _was_ pretty serious, and his mother would probably corroborate that. 

“It’s nothing life-threatening, don’t worry about it.” 

There! 

“So call me back whenever you guys can, okay? I hope that everything’s been well with you. I love you.”

His heart was pounding when he hung up the phone, though Chris didn’t know why. He waited a few minutes to see if his parents would call him back, but he gave up after almost ten minutes. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea to spend some time rehearsing the general gist of what he would say when he finally talked to his family…

No, no, rehearsing speeches had only helped him when he was still in school— _never_ with his parents. His mom would immediately notice, and he didn’t want to have to sit through a lecture on the phone. 

Chris walked towards his room and flopped down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. He raised his left arm and couldn’t help the disappointment that made a knot in his throat when he saw that his soul-mark, against his wishes, hadn’t disappeared. It had already scarred, like his parents’ names on each other, so if he crossed his eyes, it was practically invisible. But it was part of him now, a permanent mark on his skin, and Chris was fully aware of it, and he was also fully aware that crossing his eyes would never make it go away. 

“Charlie,” he read out loud. “0152-686-563-9…” 

A name. Half a phone number. Why had the universe chosen that particular information as his permanent soul-mark? Was it only because he and Darren had been at the same place and at the same time when he’d written it on his own arm? 

Chris let his arm drop to his forehead, and he closed his eyes. He wouldn’t be able to get any packing done today. 

*

Darren was already in the car when Chris was picked up. 

“Hey,” he greeted Chris, who nodded back in response. Traffic wasn’t terrible, for a change, so it wouldn’t take them long to reach Fifth Avenue. Chris looked out the window, watching other cars drive past them, along with a few taxis here and there. He had texted Jen earlier in the morning, telling her he was sorry, he’d probably be a little late today, but he would explain everything to her when he arrived—she hadn’t answered him yet, so Chris kept a firm grasp on his phone. He had a lot of explaining to do to a lot of people, and he didn’t like it. He wasn’t used to having to explain himself. 

“This is kinda exciting, huh?”

Chris turned to look at Darren, who was, once again, toying with his fingers. He was staring at Chris like he was already sorry for what he’d said. 

“Yeah, I guess,” Chris responded. He didn’t know if _exciting_ was the word he would use, though. 

“I’ve never had a roommate, not even in college,” Darren went on, gazing out the window. “I mean, it’s kinda like having a roommate, right?”

It… actually was, in a way. 

“I never shared my room with anyone else,” Darren continued. Then he immediately turned to Chris with alarmed eyes. “I-I mean, not that we _have_ to, that’s not what I’m saying, I don’t even know if there’s gonna be one room or two, I’m just— I-I’m sorry, I’m probably rambling, aren’t I?”

Chris couldn’t help chuckling. “Just a little,” he said. 

“I do that when I’m nervous.”

“Yes, I noticed,” Chris said. Darren chuckled, too, and he scratched the back of his neck, but some of his nervousness appeared to leave his shoulders. 

The driver glanced at them through the rearview mirror, and Chris could’ve sworn he saw the man bite back a smile, like this wasn’t the first time he had heard two newly-found soul mates awkwardly trying to make small talk with each other after the excited buzz of the first meeting had started to wear off. 

“So you’ve never shared your living space with anyone else?” Chris asked.

“Well, it’s not like I’ve _always_ lived by myself,” Darren answered, and he looked almost thankful that Chris had resumed the topic. “It’s just that my room has always been just _my_ room, you know?”

“I only started having a room of my own when I moved out of my house,” Chris mused. “Before that, I shared it with my sister.” 

“You have a sister?” Chris slowly nodded his head, a bit surprised at the joyous expression on Darren’s face. Then he remembered that, for some reason, his soul mate liked finding out more about him. This small talk between them must be like Thanksgiving for him. 

“Yeah, a few years younger,” Chris replied. “Her name is Hannah.”

“That’s so cool!” Darren cried. “I always wanted a younger brother, but the only one I have is older than me—Chuck.”

Chuck. _Chuck_ was a diminutive of _Charles_ , wasn’t it?

“Not Charlie?” Chris asked before he could stop himself.

Darren seemed to hear the question hidden between the lines, and he let out a tiny nervous laugh. “No, uh, that’s—that’s _another_ Charles I happen to know.” He looked down at the incomplete phone number on his left arm, which had also scarred, matching Chris’ soul-mark. “He’s an old friend of mine, but he travels a lot and apparently he’s had a new phone for a few months now. Allison was giving me his new number when…” 

He stopped mid-sentence, his eyes still on his soul-mark. Chis raised his arm from his lap and gazed down at his own scar, softly touching the pads of his fingers to his skin. 

“I still have to ask her for the rest of it,” Darren said, breaking the tense silence looming over their heads for only a second. 

Chris was gladder than he was willing to admit when the driver finally stopped the car and announced that they had arrived. On the outside, their “home” didn’t look like much: it was a two-store building with a small lawn on the front, a window next to the door and another one on the second store. The driver had the keys to the house, so he opened the door and then stepped aside to let Chris and Darren walk in. 

In the bottom floor were the living room—with a shelf on one of the walls next to another smaller shelf with a TV resting atop it, and a couch in the shape of an L accommodated on the opposite corner—and the kitchen, complete with a few wooden cabinets, a sink, an oven, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a dining table with four chairs. There was a closed door next to the stairs, which Chris guessed was probably the bathroom. 

“Ooh, carpeted stairs!” Darren said as he climbed them. Chris followed him up to the second store, where they found…

“Three rooms?” Chris asked. One of the rooms, the one in the middle, was noticeably bigger than the other two, with a queen-sized mattress instead of a twin-sized one like the other two rooms. The three of them also two bedside tables, though the two smaller ones had a desk and a closet as well. 

“Why are there three rooms?” Darren questioned their driver, who had climbed the stairs after them. 

“There’s one for each of you,” the man answered, “and the other one is the one you’ll inhabit together. A relationship between soul mates isn’t perfect, despite being meant to be, so having a room of your own is preferable to one of you having to sleep on the couch every once in a while.”

This was a surprising turn of events, but it was definitely one Chris agreed with. He was glad about still having his own room, even though he and Darren were most likely expected to immediately move into the bigger one. At least he could still have his own personal space, his boundaries—certainly, that made him breathe a little easier. 

“Anything else I can help you with?” 

“I don’t think so,” Darren said, eyeing the three rooms in front of them. “That’s all from me, thank you. Chris?” 

Chris turned to their driver with a polite smile. “No, thank you, I think that’d be all.” 

“Very well,” said the man. “I’ll leave your keys and my phone number on the table, in case you need anything.”

“Thank you!” cried Darren. Their driver nodded his head and made his way downstairs. Darren turned to Chris with a look he couldn’t quite decipher, so he glanced away into one of the single rooms. 

“If you wanna,” Darren told him, “you can choose your room first.”

“Are you sure?” Chris asked him. Both individual rooms were almost identical, and Chris could work with either of them. He didn’t know if his soul mate was into some sort of balance bullshit, where he had to be on one side of a living space, depending on what it was. “I don’t mind one over the other.”

“Me neither. If it makes you more comfortable, though, I can go first.”

Chris leaned against the doorframe of the room on the right. “I think I like this one.” He could already envision some of the changes he wanted to perform on this place—he could move the desk to one of the other walls, maybe move his bed to another wall… He was going to need a shelf or something similar for his books… Maybe he could use the one in the living room downstairs?

“Great!” Darren turned to the room on the left. “I guess we won’t exactly be like roommates after all, huh.”

“I guess not,” Chris said, shrugging. He wasn’t entirely disappointed about that. 

While Darren stepped into his room, Chris walked down to the living room, sitting down on his new couch. He glanced around the house—to be honest, it was quite cozy, or at least it seemed to be, so far. It was more space than he would need on his own, but he had to remember that he wasn’t going to be living here alone. 

He tried not to think too much about that, but he still dropped his head on his hands. How was this thing _ever_ going to work between them? While Chris was glad that they each had their separate bedrooms, they also couldn’t avoid each other forever, right? They were _soul mates_ , meant to be together, to want to be physically next to each other 24/7, whether Chris liked it or not. But he hadn’t had the urge to be next to Darren in the time he had known him, even though he was _supposed_ to have by now. Then again, Darren didn’t seem to be any different.

Chris took a deep breath, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth a few times. He couldn’t continue worrying about this. He and Darren were soul mates, the end. This was going to work out one way or another. He still didn’t know how, but he had to believe. 

And as small as that belief was, it was all Chris had left. 

He went to the kitchen and looked through the cabinets until he found a coffee machine. He didn’t know whether he wanted to laugh or cry at the irony. 

*

“So,” Jen asked him one day the library was strangely empty, save for a few high school students and the occasional parent with their child, “how’s the soul mate life treating you?”

Chris tried not to groan. She’d been asking him the exact same question for the past two weeks, except that now he actually had to answer her. He was suddenly angry at the lack of patrons, even if he generally wished the library was this calm and quiet.

“Okay, I suppose,” he responded. 

“Just okay?” She bumped her shoulder against his. “Not head-over-heels, wanna-be-together-all-the-time yet?”

“Not really.”

Truth be told, it hadn’t been a _terrible_ couple of weeks, despite Chris’ original expectations. He and Darren woke up around the same time and usually talked for a bit before Chris left for work, and this last week they had started dining together, each of them sitting on opposite sides of the table. Some nights Darren cooked (and he was pretty good at it) and some other nights they ordered takeout. Since he had been the one to attempt small talk between them during their first interactions, Chris had imagined Darren was more of a chatting person, but he was almost always quiet when they had dinner, letting Chris tell him whatever he wanted about his day, which wasn’t all that much anyway. 

Not to say that Darren didn’t do all the talking sometimes—so far, what Chris knew about his soul mate was that Darren was twenty-six (three years older than Chris), he was from San Francisco but had moved to New York last year, and he had worked as a music teacher back in his hometown for some time before he took a bit of a “break” to work on a personal project: an album of original songs he was writing, apparently. He was also half-Filipino on his mother’s side (though he described himself as Eurasian because of his father’s English, German, and Irish descent), and he knew how to play nearly every instrument Chris could think of. The guitar wasn’t that much of a surprise, since Darren had one leaning against one of the walls of his room, but there were about a dozen more in his repertoire. 

“I always kept my hands busy as a kid,” he said one night in response to Chris’ shocked expression. 

Sure, the entire situation was still… kind of awkward, but it wasn’t that bad. He and Darren were getting along just fine, which was, honestly, more progress than Chris had thought they would achieve in only two weeks. 

“What about him?”

“Hm?” Chris asked. 

“You know, is he still not declaring his undying love for you?” Jen wondered, leaning almost all of her weight on top of Chris. 

“ _No_ ,” he answered. “And I honestly don’t see it happening anytime soon.”

Jen rolled her eyes at him. She had been surprisingly supportive of Chris’ strange soul-mark since she had met him, but sometimes she did manage to get on his nerves. “Alright, Romeo,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you! The universe works in mysterious ways when it comes to soul mates!”

 _No shit, Sherlock,_ Chris nearly snapped, but he was able to bite down on his tongue.

When Chris got home later that day—and he was still slightly freaked out by that thought, by actually having a place he called “home” where he lived with someone he had only known fifteen days—he saw Darren lying down on the couch, holding a notebook in one hand and a pen on the other one. Chris had seen many pens in his lifetime, but he would recognize the one Darren was using anywhere. 

“I didn’t think you’d still have that pen,” he called. Darren looked his way, apparently unaware until that point that Chris had walked through the door. 

“I just happen to really like this pen, okay?” he said, waving the writing utensil in question. “I’ve had it for years and it hasn’t run out of ink yet!” 

“Wonderful,” Chris said as he made his way towards the kitchen. There was a can of Diet Coke waiting for him in the fridge, and he could really use a cold drink right now. “What’s with the change of scenery? You usually write your songs in your room.” Next to his soda can, Chris saw a pot of rice and a bigger pot filled with the leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. 

“After a while, my brain gets tired of staring at the same four walls all day long,” Darren said. “I change rooms a couple times a day, and I generally end up back at my room by the time you get back from work. But I lost track of time, so.” He rolled over, planting his feet on the floor before he stood up and followed Chris into the kitchen. 

They had made a sort of unspoken agreement when it came to setting the table for dinner: Chris was the one to get the food from the fridge or the stove and Darren was the one to get the cutlery. Chris took the pot of rice and placed it on the stove to heat it back up; meanwhile, Darren emptied yesterday’s leftovers on two plates to put them in the microwave, once he had set the table. 

“You know,” he said over the noise of the microwave. “I’ve always been the kinda person who writes on his arm.”

Chris, his hands on the sink as he waited for the rice to be ready, was suddenly tense. He didn’t like the conversation Darren was leading him into. 

“Ever since I was little,” Darren continued, none the wiser. “I’ve always been kinda forgetful, so my solution was to write down important things so that I would remember them. But then I’d get bored and start drawing on my arm with crayons or pencil colors or anything I could use. Sometimes, when I was already a few years older, I’d be out in the street and think of a really cool line for a song, and if I didn’t have a pen or something with me, I’d ask to borrow one so that I could write it on my arm. I never liked using my phone for that sorta thing, because then I always forgot to check it. Writing stuff on a place where I could always see it was always better.”

The only sound in the entire house was the microwave beeping down until the plate of leftovers was completely heated up. Out of the corner of his eye, Chris saw Darren glancing over at him. During a few seconds, neither of them said anything, but Chris knew that if he didn’t speak first, Darren would eventually beat him to the punch. 

His soul mate cleared his throat, and Chris prepared himself for whatever words came out of his mouth next. 

“When was…” Darren cleared his throat again, this time more forcefully. “I mean, because the only handwriting on my skin was always just _mine_ , you know, so…” Chris didn’t turn to look at him. “When was the first time any of my handwriting showed up on your arm?”

“Look, Darren—” Chris clutched the edge of the sink, swallowing the knot that had formed in his throat. “I know we’re… _soul mates_ and all that,” he said. “And so far, everything’s been fine, hasn’t it? But that’s something I’d really, really, _really_ rather not talk about right now, nor anytime soon. Okay?”

Darren gazed down at the kitchen floor, suddenly fascinated by the slightly discolored tiles. 

“Yeah, okay,” he muttered. “Yeah, that’s—that’s okay.”

The microwave beeped loudly, announcing over the timer that the food was ready, and Darren hurried to take out the plate of leftovers and introduce the second one. After making sure the rice was done, Chris turned off the stove and carried the pot over to the middle of the table. 

That night, contrary to how it had been the last two weeks, their dinner was eaten in silence. 

*

He hadn’t shown any of them, after all. 

He was thirteen and he was sitting in an office, on a couch, in front of a man with glasses and a smile that looked a little too fake. 

No soul-mark had appeared on him yet. He was sure it would’ve by now but it hadn’t, and the kids at school had only gotten meaner with every passing year. Some of them were still polite _enough_ to only whisper behind his back, but some of them had become bolder and started to directly confront him: “Hey, weirdo, where’s your soul-mark? Oh, wait, you _don’t have one_.”

“Does it bother you?” the man—Dr.… what was his name, again?—asked him. “Not having a soul-mark?”

“Not having a soul-mark doesn’t bother me,” Chris said, which was mostly the truth. “What bothers me is how people treat me because of it. You’d think _they_ were the ones without it.”

“It’s completely normal not to have one at your age,” the doctor said, like he was trying to make Chris feel better. Like Chris didn’t know this already, as if he hadn’t been told this by his parents and his teachers and even some of his nicer classmates. 

“No, I know,” Chris replied. “It’s just…” He sighed and leaned his head back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling. It was painted light-blue, like the sky on a bright, clear day. Funny, he would’ve thought the ceiling would be painted white or beige or some other color along those lines. “It just starts wearing me down, I guess, having to defend myself for something I don’t have any control of.” 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he had thought once, if he could actually have control over his soul-mark? Over what it would be and when it would show up? 

The doctor subtly glanced at the clock—though it wasn’t as subtly as he wanted it to be, because Chris still saw him do it. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to do a little exercise when you get home, to see if maybe it can lift your spirits. Have you ever seen a soul mate reunion in person?”

Chris immediately grinned, remembering the soul mate meeting he had witnessed in the park last year. “Yes!” he exclaimed, already feeling better. 

“Did you personally know the soul mates?”

“No.”

“But you still felt excited for them, didn’t you?” the doctor asked, smiling. “Even if you didn’t know them, their happiness was quite contagious, wasn’t it?” Chris could only nod in response. That entire day, he hadn’t stopped thinking about the boy and the girl embracing, about how happy they looked, about how it seemed like they had truly been waiting to find each other since they had begun breathing. “So during three days, you’re going to spend an hour reading soul mate stories. Or watching soul mate reunions, if you’d prefer. You can easily find blogs dedicated to posting those anecdotes online, or you can ask your parents for help. Then, during four days, you’re going to cut that time to only half an hour. Your mother mentioned you like writing?”

“Yeah, I love writing,” Chris confirmed. It almost seemed like he had gotten _more_ into writing the past couple of months—years later, another therapist would tell him it had been an unconscious coping mechanism, his escape from the bullying and the hurtful words from the people surrounding him. 

“Then, if you want to or if you find that it helps you, you can write a story of how you would like to meet your soul mate. If that’s a little too much for you, you can start by writing how you’d like to find out about your soul-mark. What do you want it to be? Where would you like to see it, in case it’s a skin-mark? Let your imagination run wild, okay?”

The computer in the Colfer household was rarely used, but after almost an hour, it was ready for Chris to use. His dad helped him find a blog with thousands of submitted entries depicting soul mates finding each other one way or another. Chris had reading material for _weeks_ , but he asked his father to tell him when his hour was up so that he wouldn’t lose track of time. 

“We’re gonna take Hannah to the doctor for a check-up,” his dad said. “We’ll take around an hour, so time’s up when we get back, alright?”

“Okay, Dad,” Chris said, already too enthralled in what he was reading to hear anything of what his parents said. 

There were a man and a woman who had found each other when they were almost thirty in a Halloween party; there was another couple who had become friends through being pen-pals and had realized they were soul mates when they finally met in person; there was a boy who’d met his soul mate when he took his cat to the vet and saw the girl with a puking dog on her lap (and Chris couldn’t help but laugh out loud when he read that their only fight had been over which pet they were going to keep, settling on keeping both and later figuring out how they’d pay for their expenses); there were two boys who’d only ever seen the world in one shade of color, and suddenly they could see colors they had only ever heard about—

Two boys. 

Chris had always believed that soul mates could only be a boy and a girl, but… two _boys_? 

He had started feeling a little flustered when certain boys in his classroom—certain _kinder_ boys than the rest—turned to look at him or asked him something, and at first he’d thought it was because he was glad that they still talked to him, that they weren’t mean like the other boys, that they didn’t insult him at every chance they had. 

He had never wanted to believe that… that he liked them, that he had a _crush_ on them, because he was a boy and _they_ were boys and boys couldn’t like other boys, that was wrong, that wasn’t _normal_ , they could _only_ like girls, right?

But… but if two boys could be soul mates, then—then maybe…

Chris glanced down at his arms, which were crossed on top of the desk where the computer monitor rested. 

There was a flower on his left arm. It was a yellow circle with petals drawn in different colors around it and a green leaf underneath it. 

There was a bright, colorful flower on Chris’ arm, and he was completely, positively _sure_ that he hadn’t drawn it. 

*

“I actually had two girlfriends, you know.”

Chris’ hand stopped halfway to his mouth. “You did not.”

“I did!” Darren cried through a mouthful of spaghetti. He took a sip of the iced tea Chris had made (because he was “healthy” and he “didn’t like drinking soda”) so as not to choke on his food. “It wasn’t, like, one right after the other one, but I did go out with two girls in my single years.”

“I’m sorry,” Chris chuckled, “I just find it a little hard to believe that someone who knows he has a soul mate would go out with anybody, let alone _two_ people.”

“Well, in my defense, I didn’t know I had a soul mate.” Darren hadn’t meant it as any kind of jab or attack against Chris—he had learned in this past month that Darren probably didn’t have a single “mean” or “evil” bone in his entire body—but Chris still felt guilty. He remembered what Darren had told him two weeks ago, that the only handwriting he’d ever seen on his skin had always been his own. 

He tried not to let it show, but his face must’ve betrayed him, because he saw how a tiny bit of the spark in Darren’s eyes diminished. Another thing he had learned about Darren was that he was annoyingly good at reading Chris’ face. He was also, however, incredibly good at quickly dissipating whatever tension may arise between them. Or at least, most of the time. 

“I mean, I did like both of the girls I went out with, I really did!” Darren went on. “But I—I guess I was also hoping one of them would be my soul mate? Because I’ve known soul mates who knew each other their whole lives and found out they were soul mates until they were like, twenty-something. So I always thought, well, maybe I need to date my soul mate first, you know? Fall in love with them naturally and then _boom_ , turns out we’re soul mates, that kinda thing.” 

“And how did those relationships end?” Chris asked, drinking from his can of Diet Coke. “If it’s—I mean, if it’s not too personal.”

“No, not at all!” Darren said. Chris had to give it to him, his soul mate was way more comfortable sharing his life story than him. It was like he was willing to reveal everything about him to Chris if he just asked politely. “I was actually the one who broke up with my first girlfriend. At that point, it was really clear to me that she was just with me out of pity and not because she _wanted_ to be with me, so I thought it’d be better if we were just friends.”

“So, what, she just felt bad for you and that’s why she was your girlfriend?”

Darren drank the last of his iced tea. “Yeah, pretty much. And the second one didn’t literally break up with me, but I thought it was a given since she found her soul mate while we were out on a date.”

Chris nearly choked on his spaghetti. “You guys were out on a date and she _found her soul mate_?”

“It was quite dramatic,” Darren sighed with feigned woe, though it probably wasn’t as feigned as he wanted to make it seem. “We were in a diner where a mutual friend worked, and in the blink of an eye, it was like I didn’t exist anymore. She stood up from our table and walked over to a girl who’d just walked in. The place turned into this sorta celebration party for them, so I paid the milkshakes we’d ordered and excused myself.”

“Wow.” Chris made a face at his plate. He suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore. “I’m sorry.”

“Nah.” Darren waved his fork in the air. “It wasn’t that big a deal. We remained friends after that, and even nowadays we’re still in contact.”

“I don’t know if I could ever do that,” Chris confessed, still looking down at his spaghetti. He’d never dated anyone, but he didn’t know if he’d be able to still be friends with someone he’d gone out with—someone he’d hoped would be his soul mate, only to find out that he had never actually stood a chance. 

“Well, I’d already met her parents, so it would’ve been a little weird if we had just cut ties, you know?” said Darren.

Chris met his eyes. “How long did you two go out?”

“Almost three months.”

“You met her parents after going out for less than three months?”

Darren winked at Chris. “What can I say? I’m extremely charming.” Chris held back a snort, but even he couldn’t find it in himself to argue against that. “Speaking of which, I think I should meet yours. And you should meet mine, of course.”

Chris cleared his throat, taking a sip from his can of soda. He could already imagine that scenario, and he wasn’t too eager to live through it just yet. “We’ve only been soul mates for a month,” he said. “Perhaps it’d be a good idea to wait a little longer? You know, at least two more months?”

“Okay,” Darren laughed. “Alright, I can give you two more months.”

 _Hopefully it’ll be more than two months,_ Chris thought, but he didn’t dare say it. 

*

“You…” Dr. Ramirez seemed to be at a loss for words. “You think you _hallucinated_ your soul-marks?”

“I know, I know, it probably sounds like I’m crazy, I know!” Chris groaned, hiding his face on his hands. 

He was nearly sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and his soul-marks had stopped appearing almost a year ago. 

“What makes you think your soul-marks were a hallucination, Chris?” 

Chris looked down at his bare arms, and he glared at his left one as if it was cursed, as if it had a mind of its own. 

It had all started with the brightly colored flower that had shown up when he was thirteen, the day he began reading soul mate stories online. He had immediately rushed off to find a pen so that he could write or draw something in response—once he’d found a red one, he sat back down in front of the computer and hurriedly written, _are you really there?_

As soon as he had finished writing the question mark, the four words were erased from his arm, as if someone had wiped it with a moist toilette. Maybe this was like in _Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets_ , and his soul mate had seen his question and was now going to answer him. Then again, if that was the case, why was the flower still on his arm? It could be that the Harry Potter system only worked with questions and sentences, so Chris waited for an answer from his soul mate. It was a simple thing, really, all they had to do was say _yes_ or _no_. 

Chris kept waiting for what seemed like an eternity, but nothing else showed up on his arm. 

After a few minutes, Chris tried writing something else: _what’s your name?_

He hadn’t even finished writing his question when it was wiped from his skin, just like before. Was he—was he doing something wrong? Was he not supposed to ask his soul mate anything? Was he just supposed to see the flowers they drew on their own arm?

He hadn’t told his parents anything about the matter (at least not then), or the therapist he’d been seeing back then. He wanted to have more information about this strange kind of soul-mark before he mentioned it to anyway. 

During the next few months, Chris researched types of skin-marks on the internet, in books, in magazines, in educational videos, and any other kind of media he could think of. Not a single source mentioned a skin-mark in which what one soul mate wrote on their skin was also written on the other soul mate in the exact same place. But Chris was sure, he was _positive_ he’d had a flower on his arm—one he had certainly not drawn on himself. 

As two years went by, Chris kept seeing little things pop up on his arm, like they were part of his transition into puberty: at first it was only flowers, but then it was random musical notes or smiley faces, and then they were numbers and a few random words joined by different straight and curvy lines. At some point, Chris had tried writing on himself again, to see if his soul mate would answer him now— _I don’t know if this is working._

Just as it had happened the first two times he had done it, his words were wiped clean off his skin. Chris tried not to feel too disappointed, but he couldn’t help it. Why could his soul mate send him whatever little thing he wrote on his arm, but when Chris wanted to do the same, he _couldn’t_? Well, it… it wasn’t so bad, he supposed. He could probably live with this, with knowing his soul mate was out there, making his days better and brighter with random tiny drawings and weird diagrams that only they understood. Maybe one day his soul mate would realize what they were doing and ask Chris something—maybe that’s how it worked! Maybe, since they had begun drawing on their arm first, they were the ones who had to initiate communication with him.

But one day, there was nothing written on Chris’ arm. And that was nothing new; his soul mate didn’t fill up his skin with different colors every single day. But after a year without any new soul-marks, Chris was convinced he’d imagined the whole thing. That was why his questions never had a response, because he had been so _desperate_ to have a soul-mark, to finally show everyone that they’d been wrong, that he’d imagined seeing flowers and musical notes and words and lines and smiley faces when there had been nothing on his arm to begin with.

At least, that was his theory. 

“Chris, don’t you think you’re being a little too hard on yourself?” Dr. Ramirez asked him. He liked her better than he’d liked his previous therapist, who had always looked like he was secretly judging Chris. 

Chris shrugged, not knowing what else to say. He was tired of this, he was so done with this whole soul mate business. He was almost sixteen—he was too old to _just_ get his soul-mark now. He kind of wished that he’d actually imagined everything, because at least he could be sure that he didn’t have a soul mate. He had nothing left to wait for, and he could move on with his life knowing that he wasn’t destined to be with anyone. If he fell in love with someone, it would be because he’d gotten to know them, not because whatever mystical force had brought them together. 

Dr. Ramirez leaned forward in her chair. “Chris, there are many kinds of soul-marks we don’t know about. Perhaps yours is a less common one. We don’t know how soul-marks actually work, either, so it could also be that yours is—how should I put it?—slightly unstable.”

Chris lifted his head from his hands. “Unstable?”

“Maybe it’s a new kind of soul-mark, one that’s never been seen before,” Dr. Ramirez said. “And the universe is still trying to figure out how it works. Maybe it’s not as easy as simply asking your soul mate what their name is or where they are.”

“I guess,” he said, not entirely convinced. But her theory was better than his—at least in hers he wasn’t insane, hallucinating brightly colored fauna on his arm, though he was still inclined to believe that he didn’t really have a soul mate and everything had been a product of his imagination. It would make his life so much easier. 

As his sixteenth birthday got closer and closer, Chris found that he was okay with not having a soul mate. He had been miserable most of the past few years, wondering if he was slowly going crazy or if the universe was playing a cruel prank on him. So what if he didn’t have a soul-mark? That only meant he had a certain freedom that people with a soul-mark didn’t. He was free to actually _choose_ who to spend his life with, if he even wanted to spend his life with someone else. 

Three days before he turned sixteen, Chris woke up with two lines written on his arm, encircled by musical notes as if they were part of a song. 

He didn’t leave his bed at all that day, and he kept his arm hidden underneath his pillow until the sun set and night fell, unable to stare at his new soul-mark. 

He had never felt so tired. 

*

For an entire month, Chris was in a good mood. He had actually grown used to the idea of having a soul mate, of living with him; he and Darren had become sort of friends, and most of the time, they got along just fine. Things were—how had Darren put it?— _swell_ between them. 

But after three weeks, he had grown tired of people continuously implying he was doing something wrong. 

“Are you _sure_ you don’t feel like just eloping and marrying this guy?” one of his co-workers, Ashton, had asked him for an entire week. “I mean, it’s been almost two months now.” 

“Are you guys still, like, not in love?” another co-worker, Eliza, had questioned him just two days ago. “My mom says that after a week, she and my dad were already planning their wedding. And after another week—”

Chris hadn’t stayed to hear the end of her sentence. 

He’d thought he was in the clear for the day, but then a guy he barely talked to—Andrew, was it? Chris didn’t even know his name—came up to him and muttered, “Oh, hey, you’re the guy who’s ‘roommates’ with his soul mate, right?” Chris heard the air quotes in his co-worker’s words, and he walked away before he punched the guy in the face. 

Listening to the people he worked with make those kinds of comments reminded Chris of when he was back in high school, when his classmates would point him out amongst a crowd, calling him a freak and laughing at the weird marks on his arm. It was exhausting, to say the least, and Chris wasn’t in the mood for it—if he heard one more comment about how he and Darren weren’t being the soul mates they were supposed to be, Chris was going to bite someone’s head off. 

It was almost time for his shift to end when Jen bumped her shoulder against his. She leaned next to him on the counter, taking in his expression. 

“Long day?”

“It never seems to end,” he answered, sighing. He glanced at the clock, counting down the minutes until he could go home. 

“At least it’s Friday,” Jen told him. He knew she meant it as comfort for him—while Chris could stay home on the weekends, she had to work a four-hour-shift every Saturday—but it didn’t really feel like it was. For a moment, it seemed like she wasn’t going to mention anything soul-mate-related, but after she took a deep breath, Chris prepared himself. 

“Look,” Jen said, always the cherry on top of his problems. “I know you said you didn’t think it was going to happen anytime soon—” She hadn’t even finished her sentence and Chris’ blood was already boiling. “But I still find it kinda weird that you guys haven’t, like, already planned your entire lives together.”

“And I still find it kind of weird that you guys keep meddling in my business!” he yelled, barely holding himself back from slamming his hands against the counter. Jen seemed to think he was going to, because she backed away from him. “I’m sorry if Darren and I aren’t the magazine picture of a perfect soul mate relationship, okay? But I’d really appreciate if all of you stopped mentioning it at every single opportunity you have!”

Jen defensively raised her arms in the air. She glanced back at the clock and muttered that Chris could go home now. Chris took off his nametag and almost threw it onto the counter. He didn’t even say, “See you on Monday” as he stomped his way towards the entrance of the library, fuming the whole way home. 

Darren was waiting for him on the couch when he crossed the door of their house, and by the look on his face, his day hadn’t been all that better. 

“Hey,” Darren said, getting to his feet. “So, um, I think there’s something we need to talk about.”

“Oh, god, not you, too,” Chris groaned, running his hand down his face. “I already heard enough of this at work. No, we’re not in love with each other yet, we’re not all over each other all the time yet, so what? Things are fine the way they’re now!”

“No, yes, I know, I think that’s fine, too! But I also think it’s important we talk about it!” Darren cried. “I mean, are we… are we doing something wrong? Because according to my brother and my parents and pretty much every single person I’ve talked to lately, we should be planning how many kids we’re gonna have by now!”

“Really?” Chris grabbed onto one of the chairs from their dining table. “Because according to one of my co-workers, we should be getting married in two weeks!”

“I know everything’s been good between us,” Darren said, stepping closer to Chris. “But… I mean, don’t you think it’s weird that we don’t—that we don’t feel, like, _more_ love for each other?”

“ _More_ love?” Chris echoed, and he wanted to laugh at the stupidity of it, but he was so angry, so _frustrated_ that he couldn’t even think about laughing. “Darren, I’m going to say this with all the honesty and kindness that I can muster at the moment. You’re a good guy, you really are, and I _like_ you, but I don’t _love_ you! I don’t know if I’ve _ever_ felt any kind of love for you!”

Chris wanted to take those words back as soon as he saw Darren’s expression. He looked so defeated, so _crushed_ , and Chris wondered if he’d been hoping that Chris was starting to fall in love with him. But if Darren wanted to talk, then they were going to talk, and Chris was going to be as honest as he had to be. 

Then Darren’s eyes lit up again—Chris already knew he wouldn’t like whatever words came out of his mouth right now. 

“True love’s kiss,” he whispered, like it was the answer to the secret of the universe. 

_True love’s kiss._

Chris had read a few stories containing those exact words when he still believed in the entire soul mate gist, before he realized his life would be easier and simpler if he just gave up on it and planned a life of his own, where he was happy and successful without having to wait for his supposed, mostly hypothetical life partner to show up. It was supposed to work like it did in every single goddamn Disney movie, where the prince and the princess could’ve known each other for three days and a kiss was all it took to seal the deal, to bring someone back from an eternal curse. 

True love’s kiss. As if they were characters in a shitty fairy tale. As if Chris was a fucking damsel in distress and Darren had just climbed a fucking tower to rescue him.

“I have heard you spew quite the amount of ridiculous bullshit,” Chris said, even though he wanted to shout, he wanted to scream, he didn’t want to be _civil_ about this, “but _this_ has got to be the most ridiculous thing you’ve said so far!”

“I’m serious!” Darren cried, and Chris couldn’t understand how he could say those words, how he could genuinely mean them. Was he really that naïve? Was he really that _stupid_? “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve heard other people say it works! I mean, not…” He looked down at the floor and nervously played with his fingers, a habit Chris had gotten used to seeing. “Not all of them started like—like _us_ , but some friends of mine have told me that it does work! Whenever they began doubting themselves, a kiss was all it took to know that they were meant to be!”

This was, truthfully, the worst, stupidest, most ridiculous thing Darren had ever said, and Chris knew it. But he had also known Darren long enough now to know that he wouldn’t give up on this. He wouldn’t drop the subject until he had proved to Chris that a kiss was the solution to their problems, that if they just kissed, the universe would make them hear bells in the distance, feel as though their hearts beat as one, know deep within themselves that they were soul mates destined to spend the rest of their lives together.

So Chris strode across the living room towards Darren. He grabbed his shirt with both hands and pulled him forward.

And he kissed him square on the lips. 

Chris had never kissed anyone before. He hadn’t even wanted to think about it, because all it did was remind him that he would never have anyone he could kiss or anyone who wanted to kiss him. He had never even practiced with his hand, the way he had heard girls confess in hushed whispers in the hallways and boys shyly admit in the locker rooms after Gym. 

But he still knew that if true love’s kiss did actually exist, it wouldn’t matter if Chris knew how to kiss or not—it would still feel like the world was finally turning in the right direction, like every single thing had fallen into place in his life, like he couldn’t wait to plan his and Darren’s wedding and immediately start preparing for the kids they were going to have. 

He pushed Darren away, his hands still clutching his shirt. By the absolutely destroyed look on Darren’s eyes, neither of them had felt a thing. 

“There you go,” Chris said. “There’s your true love’s kiss.”

He stomped towards the door, threw it open and then slammed it shut behind him. 

*  
Once he turned twenty-one, Chris had managed to ignore the comments people made when he told them he didn’t have a soul-mark. It was better than trying to explain his extremely rare kind of soul-mark, and he preferred the pitying looks and mocking laughs than the confused gazes and rude mumbles. He could still remember the way some people had tried to comfort him, the way he had shrugged them off because he wasn’t exactly America’s sweetheart.

“To be honest,” he’d told more than a few of them, “I don’t mind this arrangement.”

For almost two months, he had actually changed his mind: his new arrangement—living with Darren, having dinner together every night, making small talk before they each went to their separate rooms—wasn’t absolutely horrific, and while he was still trying to think of it as _normal_ , as the way the rest of his life was going to be, today had just turned all of that on its head. 

“I shouldn’t have gone to that fucking Starbucks to begin with,” Chris mumbled to himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought it, and, after the recent turn of events, it probably wouldn’t be the last. 

Chris had been fine on his own, he had spent twenty-three years by himself and he was perfectly okay. Who did Darren think he was, walking into his life after he had convinced everyone—after he had convinced _himself_ —that this was how it would be until the day he died, having to look only after himself and not having to worry about anyone else?

He looked down at the scarred name and numbers on his left arm. He felt like he was thirteen all over again, staring at a flower he hadn’t drawn, taking a red pen and writing a question that had never been answered. Why did he only ever think of communicating with his soul mate through questions? Why had he never tried anything else? Why hadn’t he drawn a stupid flower in response, or a smiley face, or a thumbs-up or a fucking squiggly line or _something_? Of course a question as straightforward as “are you really there?” hadn’t worked, much less “what’s your name?” Dr. Ramirez had been right, all those years ago. He had wanted an easy way out, to have the answers he needed right then and there instead of just relishing in the fact that he finally had a fucking skin-mark. The universe had given him the way to communicate with his soul mate and Chris had been too eager, too young, too incredibly _stupid_ to figure it out. 

God, he suddenly felt like an idiot. Walking through the darkening streets and alleys of New York only made him feel worse. 

Maybe Chris shouldn’t have lashed out at Darren the way he had. It was not—it wasn’t Darren’s fault that he and Chris were soul mates, that the law was the way it was and that there was nothing either of them could do about it. But then whose fault was it? Who was the one who decided things had to be this way? Who was the first person who thought it would be a good idea to have two people live together and fall in love, just because some unexplainable force decided they were meant to be?

Chris had believed he had a soul mate ever since his parents had explained the concept to him; had believed in a person he didn’t know with the same naïve hope children had when they made stupid wishes on shooting stars. But as the years went on and all Chris had were little flowers in colorful inks, and then random smiley faces, and then musical notes and then lyrics on his left arm every once in a while, that hope had begun dwindling until he resigned himself to imagining what those lyrics would sound like in a voice that couldn’t possibly belong to a real person.

Maybe the universe was wrong about them. What if Chris wasn’t Darren’s soul mate? They had nothing in common. They weren’t the same age. They knew only the basics about each other— they couldn’t even spend more than an hour together every day before they each went to their own rooms. Chris… He wasn’t perfect, obviously, he had always considered himself to be a work in progress, but he wasn’t cut out for this. He had made himself believe that he wasn’t cut out for this. 

And his little outburst had just been proof of that. 

Why should Darren suffer for it? 

If Chris walked away from him, maybe whatever supernatural force drew two soul mates together would realize that Darren’s soul mate was actually someone else. Darren could live and fall in love with someone he deserved—someone much, much better than Chris.

Someone who had waited his entire life to find him, instead of someone who expected to live his entire life on his own. 

Chris finally got tired of aimlessly walking around the city, so he sat down on the first bench he found to catch his breath. He ran his hands down his face, and it was only then that he caught sight of the words writing themselves on his left arm, right underneath his wrist and on top of his scar. Darren’s messy handwriting stared back at him as more words kept showing up, like invisible ink under a match. Chris couldn’t make them out in the darkness falling around him, so he stood up from the bench and stopped beneath a lamppost.

 _I’m sorry,_ was the first sentence, written in bright green and in letters so small, Chris was barely able to read them.

What was Darren sorry for?

 _if I’m not the soul mate you expected,_ the words continued. _You probably wish you were meant to be with someone else, and I can’t blame you. I know the way this works is horrible, but..._

There were a few more points after the last pause, and more kept appearing every few seconds, as if Darren were thinking of what to write and wanted to let Chris know he wasn’t finished writing. Chris had never seen how his soul-mark actually _worked_ —he had never seen the marks as they were copied from Darren’s skin onto his own, but watching it happen wasn’t as freaky as he would have thought.

Then again, he didn’t think their soul-marks would still work after the one that had brought them together had scarred. 

_I really wanna get to know you,_ Darren wrote next. _If… if you’ll let me. I’ll tell you everything you wanna know about me, if there’s anything else you wanna know. I know I can’t force you to love me or fall in love with me, and I don’t pretend_

The words suddenly stopped appearing, and Chris wondered why Darren had just left the sentence hanging in the air like that. He could see faint traces and lines of another word trying to show itself on his skin. Darren hadn’t run out of space yet, there were still some inches of free skin above the crook of Chris’ elbow, so why had he stopped writing?

Tiny black letters continued the last sentence, and the next words Darren wrote were, _(sorry, I ran out of ink and had to get another pen)._

Despite himself, Chris laughed. 

_I don’t pretend to MAKE you love me. I don’t want you to be unhappy. There’s nothing I can do about our living situation (or any other part of this situation, to be honest), but I will spend my life trying to make you_

Darren drew an arrow in the shape of a circle, and Chris turned his arm around. The black ink continued to appear, but this time it was on the other side of his left arm, starting underneath his elbow and continuing down to his wrist. 

_happy. I mean, if we’re stuck in this together, we might as well make the most out of it, right?_

As soon as Chris read the last sentence, a line started to cross it out, followed by several other lines, until the entire question was completely scratched out. 

_I’m sorry,_ Darren wrote after the scratched out sentence. _I’m sorry, that was a really guilt-tripping move from me and I didn’t mean it. I mean, I DO mean it, but not in that way? I MEAN okay look just listen, just forget I said that, please? I just want you to be happy. THAT is the only thing I really mean._

Chris waited for more words to write themselves on his arm, but he waited a few minutes and nothing else happened. He supposed Darren was done writing for now. 

This heartfelt apology from Darren only made Chris want to leave even more than he did before. Darren was too nice for Chris. He was too kind, too gentle, too loving, and if he stayed with Chris, he would never be happy himself. He would always put Chris’ needs before his own, and Chris was too selfish for him, too… too independent. He always demanded his own space, he demanded to be left alone after being around other people for too long; his entire being clashed against Darren’s. They would end up hating each other, loathing each other’s very sight, and Darren deserved better than that. He deserved better than Chris. 

Chris looked down at the last words Darren had written for him, and he noticed that more words had been added. 

_Can we just, like, at least talk about this? If you want? Maybe?_

Sure. Sure, they could talk about it all Darren wanted, and all Chris wanted, too, but it wouldn’t make any difference. If anything, it would give Chris the chance to tell Darren that this was never going to work out; for either of them. It was best that they went their separate ways, and if they were found out, Chris would say it was all his idea, it was his fault and his alone, and maybe if he spent enough time in jail or prison or suffering from whatever punishment the law thought was good enough for him, the universe would realize its mistake and assign another soul mate to Darren. 

Chris continued to stare at his arm, seeing more words show on his skin every few seconds.

_I’m not gonna lie, this is still super weird for me. Like, the thought of marking someone else’s skin when I mark my own. How fun would this be for someone with lots of tattoos? Their soul mate could get all the same tattoos for free! Unless you’re someone who hates tattoos, I guess…_

His left arm was completely covered in Darren’s handwriting at this point, and so Chris pulled up the sleeve of his right arm, in case Darren happened to be ambidextrous. There was an obvious attempt at writing, if the shaky lines drawing themselves underneath Chris’ right wrist were any indication. Then three letters followed by a question mark, written in a scraggly font resembling a ghost’s onomatopoeia in a comic book.

_leg?_

Well, apparently Darren could only write with his right hand. 

Chris had a hard time rolling his pant leg up to his knee, and by the time he’d finally done it, there were several sentences written above his sock, also going up to his knee. He was a little surprised that Darren was still talking to him, that he hadn’t given up on Chris despite his lack of response, yet he was also heartbroken because of it. Why was Darren doing this? What could he possibly gain from this?

Why was he so intent on somehow working things out between them? 

_Then again, why would a person who hates tattoos have to identify their soul mate with markings that are kinda like tattoos? That doesn’t make any sense._

Nothing soul mate related made any sense to Chris as it was. He didn’t understand why people had different soul-marks instead of it being just one kind, or why some marks were rarer than others. He didn’t understand how it worked, either. Had there ever been an unhappy couple of soul mates—two people who hated being together but had to? Were he and Darren going to be the first one? 

_I kinda feel bad for filling your body with my handwriting,_ Darren’s messages continued. _I swear I’ll wash this off tomorrow. I haven’t heard from you yet, so I just wanna make sure that you see this somehow. Are you even seeing this? God I really hope so._

Chris leaned back against the lamppost, his hands on the pockets of his jeans. Darren was honestly too good for his own good, and Chris hated that sentence just because of the repeated use of the word “good,” but it was the truth. Darren was good enough for both of them, while Chris, on the other hand, was selfish enough for both of them. 

If Darren was going to such great lengths to make this work—after he had been so polite and so kind and altogether so _wonderful_ —the least Chris could do was put in a bit of effort himself and try to make it work the same way Darren was trying. They had already screamed at each other and said the worse they had to say to each other—if that had been some kind of rock bottom, it could only go up from here, right? 

Pushing himself off the lamppost, Chris made his way back to Fifth Avenue.

*

He didn’t like the nervousness he felt when he knocked on the door of their… of Darren’s place. After he had stormed off, he didn’t feel like it was his house anymore as much as it was Darren’s. For a moment, he wondered if Darren would keep him out for a while, as a sort of punishment, but the second he heard rushed footsteps approaching from the other side of the door, he remembered his soul mate didn’t have a single bad bone in his entire body. 

The door was thrown open, and Chris had never seen such relief on anyone’s face. Darren looked like he was about to cry tears of joy.

“You came back,” he breathed out. 

A shiver ran down Chris’ spine—how many times would his soul mate’s voice give him goose bumps and make the hairs on his arms stand up? 

“I want to give it a try,” he said, then he instantly raised a finger when Darren opened his mouth to say something. “But,” he interrupted him, “we’re going to need to establish some ground rules first.” 

*

They had pasted four sheets of paper together, and then they had both sat down at the dining table to discuss the ground rules so that they could write them down on their giant paper sheet. Darren had gotten out markers of different colors, which had earned him a raised eyebrow from Chris.

“What?” Darren asked as he wrote _RULES OF THE HOUSE_ at the top of their paper sheet, using a different marker for each letter. “Just because we’re writing an official document here doesn’t mean it can’t be bright and pretty and colorful.”

Chris simply shook his head. 

“Okay,” he said, pressing the palms of his hands to the table. “First things first: we don’t know all that much about each other, and if we want this to work, we have to talk to each other. I’m not saying you have to tell me your entire life story in one day—”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Darren said. 

“— _but_ ,” Chris continued, “I do think we should have a determined amount of time every day to just talk about ourselves. To ask each other questions, if there’s any particular thing we’d like to know about the other one.”

“So, like playing 20 questions?”

“Not exactly, but you can look at it like that. We don’t necessarily have to ask and respond back and forth—it’s not a questionnaire we’re answering.”

“Okay.” Darren nodded his head, looking at his markers to decide which one to write their first rule with. “But what if one of us asks something that makes the other uncomfortable?”

“Then we can skip that question,” Chris said. “Kind of like, ‘vetoing’ the question. We change the subject and start talking about something else. Or we ask something else.”

“Alright,” Darren agreed, deciding on a blue marker. “Is an hour okay to start with?”

“An hour seems reasonable.” He leaned further on the table and wrote their first rule down. 

“Okie-dokie,” Darren mused. He leaned back on his chair to admire his work. Chris would’ve liked to write the rules himself, just because his handwriting seemed more legible than the tiny and messy letters he had seen last night on his arm, but apparently Darren had some pretty decent penmanship once he had a firm, smooth surface to write on. “What else?”

“No physical contact,” Chris said. 

Darren raised both eyebrows. “At _all_?”

Chris crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not a touchy-feely kind of person.”

“But I am,” Darren said. Chris was fully aware of that—he remembered Darren offering him his hand as they left the Starbucks where they met. 

“Okay. How about, no _uncomfortable_ physical contact?” Chris questioned, taking the red marker and twirling it around his fingers. He’d started feeling like Darren’s nervous habit of playing with his fingers was beginning to rub off on him. 

“So, let’s say, if offering you my arm makes you uncomfortable, then it’s off the table.”

“Exactly. But we can first discuss it, because maybe you offering me your arm makes me uncomfortable, but maybe I’m okay with holding hands. Just an example.”

Darren nodded his head to himself, as if he were thinking it over. “Seems fair,” he said in the end. Chris handed him the red marker and took the green one while Darren wrote down their second rule. “Anything else?”

“I feel like I’m the only one who needs these rules,” Chris grumbled through gritted teeth. “Is there nothing you want to add? Otherwise, they might as well be _CHRIS’ RULES_ instead.”

“Uh…” Darren glanced down at the rules he had written on the giant paper sheet. Then he looked up at the stairs. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel ready to use ‘our’ room just yet. The idea of sleeping on the same bed as someone else is kinda terrifying, still.”

Chris followed his gaze up the stairs, as if they were both peeking their heads inside the room between theirs, the one that belonged to the two of them, the one that had remained the same since they had been brought to this house; the one they hadn’t used yet. 

“But,” Darren continued, “I think we… I think we _might_ , at some point? I mean, we might feel ready to use it sooner than we think.”

“But until we do,” Chris said, trailing behind his soul mate’s train of thought for once, “no sleeping on the shared room.”

“And it doesn’t mean— sleeping on the same bed doesn’t mean we do—” Darren was stuttering, tripping over his words. He was suddenly blushing, avoiding making eye contact with Chris. “Just because we feel ready to sleep on the same bed doesn’t mean we’re ready to do… anything else, right?”

Chris was… quite surprised at this. He would’ve never imagined that Darren had some kind of problem with the idea of having sex. It was almost like he couldn’t even _say_ the word. Not that Chris was complaining about it. 

“Right,” he said, if only to appease Darren. “We just sleep on the same bed. Literally.”

“Literally,” Darren repeated, as if that statement made him feel better. He held out his hand so that Chris could give him the green marker. He hadn’t even given Chris the chance to grab another marker when he suddenly jumped on the chair, as if he had been electrocuted. “Oh! Okay, I got another one,” he said, and the glint on his eye gave Chris a really bad feeling. He could almost see the gears turning inside Darren’s head—he didn’t know if he was going to like this. “I know you said ‘no uncomfortable physical contact,’ but I was thinking—”

“ _Definitely_ no kissing,” Chris interrupted him.

Darren’s entire expression fell so comically that, if the situation were any different, Chris would laugh. And probably take a picture so he could remember that face. 

“How did you even know I was gonna say that?”

“I had a feeling,” Chris said, though he wasn’t exactly sure _how_ he’d known Darren was going to say that. He couldn’t read minds, after all. “We already tested true love’s kiss and it didn’t work, remember?”

“Well, yes, I know that,” Darren mentioned, and there it was, another idea forming in his head. He had always been really good at reading Chris somehow, but now it seemed like Chris was becoming better at reading Darren as well. Perhaps this was what they had needed to do since the very beginning: sit down and talk about their relationship, in whatever stage it happened to be. Maybe they had only gotten along at the start because they had waited for some magical force to do their work for them. 

Maybe that was what Chris’ co-workers had been trying to tell him—in their own peculiar way.

“I’m not saying we have to make out every day,” said Darren. He put a hand to his chest, as if this was a deeply personal matter. “But I like kissing. I think kissing is great.”

“Really? You didn’t seem to think that yesterday.”

Darren snorted. “The circumstances of yesterday weren’t the best ones for a kiss to happen.”

Chris rolled his eyes, but he wasn’t able to hold back a chuckle that made its way past his lips. He couldn’t believe they were talking about the disaster that had been the last evening as if they were discussing what they’d had for breakfast in the morning.

“And who says I didn’t like it?”

“I could tell you didn’t like it,” Chris mused. Darren hadn’t kissed him back, for starters, which had been a pretty clear sign that it hadn’t been true love’s kiss and that it’d been a pretty lousy kiss, at that. 

“Like I said,” Darren argued, “the circumstances weren’t the best. Don’t roll your eyes at me, mister! Is there no other gesture in your repertoire?”

“No, I’ve got another one,” Chris said, the corners of his lips quirking up in a smirk, “but I don’t think you’ll appreciate it any more than my eye-rolling.”

Darren narrowed his eyes at him, though he was smiling, too. “Okay, smartass,” he began. “Since you don’t like kissing but I do, how about we reach a compromise? No kissing unless _you_ initiate it.”

Chris raised an eyebrow. “You’re giving me full control of the kissing privileges in the house?” 

“Yeah!” Darren cried. “That way, if you feel like kissing me someday, I won’t stop you.”

“That’s a lot of faith you’re putting in me, Darren,” Chris said, glancing down at the markers and the giant paper sheet on the table. He touched the purple marker and rolled it with his fingers. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had put so much faith in him—the last time someone had given him this kind of… _trust._

“I don’t think you put enough faith in yourself, Chris.”

He looked up, meeting Darren’s eyes, and he found nothing but caring, gentleness, and understanding in them. 

“So.” Chris cleared his throat. “No kissing unless I initiate it.”

Darren was openly grinning now. “I think you’re starting to like the sound of that rule.” 

“I like the fact that I’m in control in that rule,” he corrected. Darren grabbed the purple marker Chris had been rolling on the table and wrote _NO KISSING_ in big, capital letters, followed by _unless Chris initiates it_ written in tiny, lowercase letters. “Oh, ha, ha.”

“Anything else you’d like to add, Mr. Colfer?” Darren asked him. 

Chris leaned forward, doing his best to read their rules upside-down. Darren saw he was having trouble at it, so he turned the giant paper sheet around. 

_RULES OF THE HOUSE_

_1) We must spend one hour everyday talking with each other about ourselves (certain questions can be vetoed if it’s uncomfortable territory)._

“‘Every day’ is two words, Darren, not one,” Chris said.

“Well, you didn’t say that when I was writing it down,” Darren told him. “So now it’s one word and you’re gonna have to live with it.”

Chris was about to roll his eyes, but he managed to stop himself before he did. __

_2) No uncomfortable physical contact.  
3) No sleeping on our shared bed until we’re both ready to spend the night together._

“I like this last bit.” Chris ran his fingers over the last four words of the third rule. “‘Spend the night together.’ It’s got a nice ring to it.” He also liked how Darren had written “we” and “our.” It was something he had found annoying the day he met Darren, when he was already referring to them with the plural pronoun, but now he found it… slightly endearing. 

“It does, doesn’t it?” Darren was completely leaning back on his chair, as if he had no energy to even support himself. He stared at their set of rules as if it were a novel he’d just finished writing. __

_4) NO KISSING unless Chris initiates it._

The rule he was in control of—it seemed kind of petty, but Darren had offered him a compromise they were both comfortable with, a middle ground they both agreed to. 

“No,” Chris mumbled. Then he repeated it louder. “No, I think that’s it from me. Do you want to add anything?”

“No, I think this looks pretty good,” Darren answered. “Oh, wait, no, yes.” 

Chris chuckled again. “So which one is it?”

“I just wanna add,” Darren said in the middle of a chuckle of his own, “that at any point during our relationship, either of us can request to go over the rules to see if we change one, or if we add one, or if we remove one, or if we just decide to delete them altogether.”

“Okay,” Chris said. “Fair enough.” He took the orange marker and offered it to Darren. “Want to write it down?”

Darren made a face at their set of rules. “Nah, I think that can be an unspoken agreement between us. Besides,” he said, looking down at the giant sheet of paper, “I don’t think another rule would fit in here.”

Chris did add two lines underneath the last rule, writing each of their names beneath each line. “Now we need to sign it to make it official.” He reached out for the black marker—while he liked their official document being so colorful, he still thought signatures had to be a little more professional—but Darren made a gesture for him to wait and ran up the stairs to his room. A minute later, he came back with his faithful pen.

“It still hasn’t run out of ink?” Chris couldn’t help wondering. He was starting to grow fond of that infernal utensil. 

“Nope,” Darren chirped. “And I’m glad it hasn’t, ‘cause this is my favorite pen. I’m starting to think it’s also a lucky pen.”

“How come?”

Darren twirled the pen in his fingers, gazing at it like it wasn’t only a lucky pen, but a magical one as well—like it was made out of gold. “No reason.”

Chris insisted on signing the document first, in case Darren wanted to back out, but his soul mate gladly took the pen when it was offered to him, signing his name next to Chris’ on its respective line. 

“Huh.”

“What?”

Darren pointed to both of their names. “Our signatures are kinda similar.” Chris leaned down to better see them, and he realized Darren was right. They both had a bit of a curve going on, even though their names didn’t start with the same letter (well, their last names did). The only real difference was the fact that Darren’s had a smiley face at the end of his. 

“Real professional,” Chris teased him.

“Oh, shush,” Darren said with a playful slap to his shoulder. “It’s cute.” Despite not wanting to agree with him, Chris had to admit it was. 

They both went into their shared bedroom, and they duct-taped their giant paper sheet with the rules of their house right above the queen-sized bed. 

*

“How many songs have you written?”

Darren leaned back against the corner of the couch, his legs outstretched in front of him and his guitar on his lap. “In my entire life?”

“You can narrow it down to a few years if they’re too many,” Chris said, leaning his elbow on the back of the couch, sitting on one of his legs a few feet away from Darren. A month had already gone by since they had sat down at the dining table to write their house rules, and their daily hour of talking to each other was proving to be the best rule they could’ve agreed on. It gave them the chance and time to simply sit down and talk about themselves, relaxing from the stresses of the day. 

“I actually don’t have that many songs,” Darren said. He plucked a few notes on his guitar, like he was going to write a song right then and there. “I mean, I have a lot of lines and verses and a few choruses, and I’ve also got a _ton_ of, like, composed songs, you know? Combinations of sounds I like. But full-fledged songs, with lyrics and everything? Maybe five or six.”

“And I assume those five or six are from the album you’re working on.”

Darren nodded in response. “Yep. Of course, I’m working on writing the lyrics to some of the songs I have, or adding music to the lyrics I already have that I really like.”

“Does it come easy to you?” Chris pondered. “Song-writing and all that?”

“Sometimes,” Darren replied, plucking a few more notes. “There was a time when I composed a lot of songs, around fifteen or twenty a week.”

“A _week_?” Chris sat on his knees. “What was the surge of inspiration behind so many songs?”

“My soul mate.” He turned his head to meet Chris’ confused gaze. “I mean, the _idea_ of my soul mate is more like it. I used to spend hours wondering how they were going to be, what they would look like, and I had this cliché, romantic idea of serenading them when I met them.”

“Wouldn’t _that_ have been a sight?” Chris imagined Darren kneeling down and serenading him in the middle of a crowded Starbucks, and he laughed at the ridiculousness. 

“I would’ve swept you off your feet, I’m sure,” Darren said, winking at Chris. 

“I’m sure you would’ve,” Chris mumbled. He’d noticed how Darren had talked about the idea of his soul mate with a gender-neutral pronoun instead of saying _he_ or _she_. “Did you ever have any gender in mind?”

Darren looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

“Did you ever think your soul mate was going to be a boy or a girl?” Chris asked, and he already wanted to tell Darren to ignore him—this wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have. “I know you said you had two girlfriends, but… I mean…”

He pressed his lips together and glanced away from Darren. He’d been self-conscious of his sexuality for a very long time, but he had never imagined he would be self-conscious of it in front of his soul mate. 

“Chris…” Darren laid his guitar on the floor and scooted closer to Chris, who wrapped his arms around himself. He thought he was done with this, with feeling ashamed and embarrassed about who he was, but it seemed like there were still a lot of insecurities lingering in his mind, waiting for the perfect moment to come up again. 

A soft hand was pressed to his knee, and Chris would bark that this was breaking the rules, they had to discuss any physical contact before they engaged in it—but Darren’s hand on his knee was actually comforting. Soothing, almost. 

“Do you—” Darren licked his lips. “Do you think I have a problem with you being a guy?”

God, it was even worse when Darren put it like that. Chris was being silly and childish and stupid. 

“Okay, I can tell you’re just thinking horrible things of yourself now,” Darren said, scooting even closer to Chris. They were practically glued together, their legs separated by only a few inches. “So I’m just gonna come out and say this: I may have gone out with two girls, but it doesn’t mean that I’m straight. It doesn’t mean that I never had a crush on a guy, or that I’m angry that my soul mate is also a guy.”

Chris wiped his eyes, even though no tears had come out of them, and he looked up at Darren. “So you’re… what, bisexual? Pan?” 

Darren chuckled softly. “I don’t really believe in labels,” he answered. “I just fall in love with a person and hope that they can love me back one way or another.”

Chris inhaled deeply through his nose. It must’ve been great, growing up without people constantly applying labels to you, asking you if you were one thing or the other, wanting to put you in a box for their own comfort. 

“I knew I was gay ever since I was thirteen,” Chris began, his eyes on the guitar resting on the floor. “I didn’t know what the word was for it, but I still knew I was it. My—my hometown wasn’t all that open about kids figuring themselves out and being something different than what everyone else was used to. It still isn’t, in any case. It’s one of the reasons I left, and I only waited so long because I didn’t have the money to move out sooner.”

Darren took his hand off Chris’ knee, but Chris grasped it with his own and pulled it back before he could change his mind. He needed to hold on to something or he’d feel like he was drowning, his head under the water with nothing to pull him out to the surface. 

“I had to tell my parents eventually,” Chris continued. “I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer; it was the kind of secret that suffocates you, the kind that rots you on the inside the more you try to hide it. They were so supportive of me, god, I—I don’t know what I would’ve done without them.” He wiped at his eyes again; even though he wasn’t crying yet, he felt like he might start to, soon. “I was terrified of finding my soul mate back home. It was this trembling fear in my chest that people would find out I was gay, because even when I wasn’t out of the closet, they were rude and insulting and hurtful, and I couldn’t imagine how it’d be like when there were two of us. So then I left that hellhole behind and I came here and—and it was better. Not perfect, definitely, but I wasn’t looking for perfection, anyway. I started feeling more comfortable in my own skin. And even though it’s been two years since then, and most of those two years have been quite amazing, some days it’s still a bit of a struggle, you know? But I’ve always thought of myself as a work in progress.”

Darren squeezed his hand, and Chris had never been more grateful for his presence than he was now. 

“A work in progress,” Darren echoed, a soft smile upon his lips. “I like that philosophy.”

*

Ever since the night of their argument, Chris had taken to carrying a pen with him wherever he went, just in case he needed to talk to Darren urgently and his phone ran out of battery or something. Besides, he had discovered that Darren rarely answered his phone—apparently he didn’t receive a lot of calls on a daily basis—so if he had to talk to his soul mate, their skin-writing soul-mark proved to be more useful. 

“That is _so_ cute,” Jen told Chris while he was in the middle of writing, _Things are hectic here, will probably be late for dinner,_ on his arm. 

“What’s so cute about it?” he asked, quickly stapling different paper sheets together to give to the raging group of middle school students that had come into the library twenty minutes ago, followed by a teacher who clearly had no control over them.

“I always thought you hated your soul-mark,” Jen said, trying to make her voice rise over the noisy prepubescent teens, “but now you’re using it to talk to each other!”

Chris was barely able to look down long enough to see Darren had written a response underneath his sentence: _Gotcha! I’ll get you two cans of Diet Coke for tonight then. *thumbs-up emoji*_ He was glad that Darren hadn’t actually tried to draw a thumbs-up emoji—the last time he’d tried drawing one, he’d actually scratched over it, making a mess on Chris’ arm. He also appreciated Darren getting him two cans of his favorite drink, especially since Darren hated it. 

He normally wouldn’t have considered any of it “cute”… but now he kind of agreed with Jen. 

Of course, what he said instead was, “You’re crazy.” He couldn’t have her thinking her cynical, grumpy co-worker had a _soft_ spot for his soul-mark, God forbid. 

*

Chris sat down at the chair of his desk and stretched his arms over his head, cracking his knuckles before putting on his reading glasses. He was decided to finally continue working on the first draft of his novel today. It had been a couple of pretty rough months, and he’d lacked inspiration for even longer than that, but today was the day he put all of that behind him. He had printed the first three chapters he had written, but instead of going over those same three chapters to edit them, he was going to continue writing, moving on with the story he so desperately wanted to share with the world. 

He was so enthralled in his writing, so pumped to get to certain scenes in particular that he’d imagined adding since he was a child, that he didn’t notice Darren standing in the doorway of his room for almost ten minutes. 

“Wow,” Darren said at last. “And I thought _I_ got lost in my own head sometimes.”

“Hey,” Chris greeted him, pushing his reading glasses to rest on top of his head. “Sorry, I’d been meaning to do this for _months_ and I just…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Lost track of time.”

“No, hey, it’s cool, happens to the best of us.”

“Anyway,” Chris said, saving his document. Just in case anything happened. “Was there anything you needed?”

“Oh, uh, no, not really,” Darren said, leaning his hand on the doorway. “No, I was just gonna—” He cleared his throat and began playing with his fingers. Good God, what could possibly be making him so nervous that he was having trouble speaking? Ever since they had established their ground rules, it seemed like their home was a generally better place than it had been before. The air never felt tense between then anymore, and they had only grown closer. Was there a problem that Chris hadn’t noticed?

“I know we both have our own individual rooms and we agreed not to use, um, ‘our room’ until we were both ready,” Darren said, “but I was wondering if maybe you wanted to spend some time with me in my room?” 

Oh. _Oh._ So this was what had made him so nervous.

“J-just talking!” Darren hurriedly cried. “I mean, we don’t have to do anything, or we can do whatever you wanna do, _I mean_ —” He buried his head in his hands, and Chris bit his lip so as not to laugh at him. His poor soul mate might interpret it as mocking. 

“Darren,” Chris said, speaking softly and carefully, always making sure to bite back his laughter. “Are you asking me to spend the rest of the day with you?”

When Darren raised his head to meet Chris’ eyes, he was blushing adorably. “If… if you want to? I know you’re busy, and I know how I get when I’m in the middle of composing a song or something, so if you—if you’d rather continue your writing—”

Chris slammed the lid of his laptop shut, took off his reading glasses so that he could leave them on top of his computer, and he stood up from the chair. “I think I’d rather spend the day at your room. I’ve never actually been in it.”

Darren chuckled, scratching the back of his neck. “It’s no big deal, really.”

“Well, that’s for me to decide, isn’t it?” Chris held his arm out. “Lead the way, Darren Everett Criss!”

The smile on Darren’s face suddenly fell; he held his arms at his sides and his legs together, as if he were a tin soldier. His entire body tensed, and Chris could almost see a few of his curls _curl_ up even more, if that was even possible. Before he could ask Darren if he was okay, Darren shook his head and relaxed his stance, like he had been under a spell which had now broken. He grinned as if there was absolutely nothing wrong. 

“Great!” he said. “Okay!” Then he skipped off towards his room, and Chris could do nothing but follow behind him. 

Darren’s room wasn’t much different than his own in terms of furniture (Chris, in any case, had brought in a few shelves to put on the wall to hold some of his books), but it still looked like an entirely different place to the room it had been the day they had arrived. Darren had pushed his desk and his bedside tables together to create one long, giant table, which had paper sheets scattered all over it. Songs Darren had written, perhaps, or was writing. There was an alarm clock on top of the sheets of paper. Right, Darren didn’t usually check his phone for anything; an alarm clock would probably be the only way he had to check the time. He also had a beanbag chair that looked too old to be recently purchased—Chris could see that it had once been pink, but the color had started washing away. He’d hung his guitar on the wall with two metal bars, and its case lay on the floor underneath it.

“Did you paint the walls, or where they always purple?” Chris questioned, noticing the bright purple staring back at him for the first time. 

“I painted them,” Darren said, stepping inside the room and flopping down onto his beanbag chair. “The beige was starting to depress me.”

How much had he tried to ignore Darren during those first weeks, Chris wondered, that he had never noticed he had painted his room a different color? 

“What do you think?”

“Looks cozy,” Chris said. 

“It is!” Darren agreed. “Don’t be shy, make yourself comfortable!”

Chris walked towards the bed and sat on its edge, leaning back on his hands. It was nice, being in a space that had been kind of prohibited to him until then. 

“So,” he began. “Since we’re already here, do you want to start our daily talking hour, or shall we leave that for later?”

Darren looked at this alarm clock. “If you want,” he said, “we can wait a bit, and then we can have our daily talking hour while we have dinner here!”

“Here?” Chris asked him. “In your room?”

“I eat in my room all the time!” Darren exclaimed. “I promise I won’t get mad if you drop something on the bed.” Chris crossed his arms over his chest.

“Excuse me? I don’t drop food.”

“Oh, yeah?” Darren mirrored his pose, like he was accepting some kind of challenge. “We’ll see how well you do when you’re sitting on the bed instead of on a chair, _Christopher Paul Colfer_.”

Chris suddenly understood why Darren had looked like a tin soldier when he’d said his full name, only a couple of minutes ago. He had completely forgotten what it did to him, hearing his own name in his soul mate’s voice, spoken like it was something only they had the right to say out loud. There was no shiver down his spine this time, but he still felt like the air abandoned his lungs for a moment. 

“Yeah,” he managed to say before Darren could realize the effect he had on Chris. Though, if his own reaction had been any indication, he was very much aware of it already. “Yeah, I—I guess we will.”

*

“I’m so glad we didn’t bet on the whole not-dropping-food thing, because I would’ve lost that _so bad_ ,” Darren moaned, leaning back against his pillow. Chris put his empty plate on top of Darren’s, and if it had been his own bed, he would’ve collapsed onto it, but this was Darren’s bed and he didn’t feel comfortable enough just lying on it as if it were his. 

“I told you,” Chris said, opting to lean back on his hands. “I don’t drop food.”

“Well, I believe you _now_.”

They were both sitting with their legs crossed underneath them, facing each other. Darren had his head back against the wall and his eyes closed, like he was about to fall asleep. Chris turned to glance at the alarm clock on his too-long table and groaned at the time. When had it become so late?

“I guess I should go to bed,” Chris said, taking both of their empty plates. Darren opened his eyes and looked at the alarm clock.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, it’s—it’s pretty late, huh? Uh, don’t worry, you can just leave these here, I’ll bring them down to the kitchen tomorrow.”

Chris stood up and walked over to Darren’s joined table to leave the plates there. “How about I put them here and you take them down to the kitchen tomorrow?”

Darren laughed, sitting straight up on his bed. “Alright.” He looked like he was about to say something else, given the fact that he started playing with his fingers, so Chris waited for him. “Hey, um, I wanted to ask—did you really feel… did you feel okay, being here in my room with me?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Chris questioned, frowning. 

“I don’t know.” Darren shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, I know it’s kind of a big step, and I just—I don’t want you to do something that makes you uncomfortable just because I stammered like an idiot when I asked you.”

Chris chuckled, barely holding back a snort. He couldn’t believe how much Darren cared for him, how much he cared about making sure Chris was always comfortable. No one had ever cared so much about him, except probably his parents and his sister. It was… quite heartwarming.

Well, one thing was for sure: Chris had been right about Darren always putting his happiness before his own. 

“To be honest,” Chris said, “I didn’t know if I would. But it was nice, having a change of scenery. I wouldn’t mind doing it again sometime.”

It was funny in a strange way, watching Darren’s expression change from worried to _beaming_ like the freaking sunrise, simply because something had turned out all right. It was even more charming than seeing him become a nervous, stuttering mess, and that was pretty charming on its own—at least, Chris thought it was, though he would never dare say it. He would only fuel Darren’s small ego and probably turn it into a monster at some point. 

“Okay,” Darren said, his grin brighter than the purple of the walls of his room. “Goodnight then, Chris.”

“Goodnight then, Dare.”

They waved each other goodnight, and Chris made his way towards his room. Guilt washed over him when he saw his reading glasses on top of his laptop. He was supposed to have spent today writing, and what had he done instead?

 _You spent some much-needed quality time with your soul mate,_ he told himself. He had enjoyed the evening, and it had helped to bring him out of his comfort zone, which was something Chris had always struggled with. He could get some more writing done another time, maybe even in Darren’s room, if the occasion arose. Today had been an overall good day, and nothing was going to ruin that for Chris. So he went downstairs to brush his teeth and then back up to his room to change into his pajamas. 

Lying down on his own bed after spending most of the evening in someone else’s felt like sleeping in the bed of a hotel room: it was just as comfortable, probably even more, but you still felt out of place—you still knew it wasn’t _your_ bed you were sleeping in. Which was more than ridiculous, because this _was_ Chris’ bed and he was fully aware of it. 

He was on the verge of finally falling asleep—after turning around from one side to the other for more than an hour—when a sudden realization jolted him awake.

He had called Darren “Dare.” He had given his soul mate a _nickname_. 

_Where the fuck did that come from?_ Chris wondered, too alert to go back to sleep anytime soon.

* 

“You know,” Chris told Darren the following week as they made their way towards Darren’s room, their plates of dinner in hand. “We’ve been spending a lot of time in your room.”

“Do you not like my room anymore?” Darren sounded almost hurt at the thought. “’Cause if you have a problem with it, you could at least be polite enough to say it before we enter it. The walls can hear you, and they have feelings, you know!” Chris rolled his eyes (and Darren was quick to point that one of these days, his eyes were going to stay like that, and what was he going to do then?). 

“I was just thinking,” he went on, “that… maybe… maybe we could spend some time in my room?”

Darren stopped only a few steps before they reached the top of the stairs and turned his body halfway back, only enough to meet Chris’ gaze. “Are you sure? Like, seriously?” he asked, and that sunrise-beaming-grin of his was already starting to overtake his mouth. 

Chris couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out of him, Darren could be such a _child_ sometimes. “Why does this make you so happy? You get so excited over such simple, small things like spending time in my room instead of in yours.” 

“Anything and everything related to you makes me happy,” Darren quickly responded, as if he hadn’t really thought about it—as if the words had been on the tip of his tongue and they had only needed the correct cue to speak themselves. Chris felt all of his blood rush to his head; he was dizzy and a tiny bit light-headed, and he could only hope that he didn’t fall down the stairs in his current state. How come he was the writer and yet Darren was always the one who left him speechless, who took his breath away with the most basic sentences?

“Well!” Darren clapped his hands together. Or, he tried his best, since he was still holding onto his plate of dinner with one of them. “Now it’s my turn to say, lead the way, Christopher Paul Colfer!”

*

He couldn’t believe they were doing this. Even though he had been the one to suggest it in the first place, he still couldn’t believe they were actually doing this. 

It had been a spontaneous suggestion, a spur of the moment kind of thing, a momentary lapse in judgment. They had been watching TV in the living room when Chris said, “I think we should start using our bedroom.”

Darren had lowered the volume of the show they hadn’t really been paying any attention to. A stupid comedy or something, Chris wasn’t sure, he hadn’t been following it all that much. “Are you serious?”

“It’s…” Chris swallowed, knowing it was too late to try to take it back. “It’s the one room we haven’t gotten covered yet. But only if you’re ready,” he said. “The rules stipulate we both have to be.”

A strange, slightly tense silence filled the space between them as Chris waited to hear Darren’s answer. He knew it’d been a stupid idea to bring it up, he was moving too fast, it had only been two months since the rules had been instated and things had been wonderful between them, they were friends, maybe even something closer than friends, whatever that was in a relationship between soul mates—

“Can you—” He turned to Darren, who still held the TV remote in his hand. “Can you… let me think about it? I mean, discuss it with my pillow and all that?”

“Yeah, yes, obviously, of course!” Chris cried, pulling his legs up to his chest. “I didn’t mean it as an immediate kind of thing, I was just—putting the cards on the table, so to speak.”

“No, I—I get it,” Darren said, always caring, always understanding. 

That had been yesterday.

Darren had thought it over. He had discussed it with his pillow. 

And tonight, they were going to sleep on the same bed for the very first time. 

God, it sounded so much worse than it actually was. 

They both stood in front of the queen-sized bed, wearing their pajamas and holding their respective pillow to their chest, like some sort of safety blanket. The bed looked too small to accommodate two people, let alone two grown men, but maybe that was Chris’ sight deceiving him. Now that he thought about it, they probably should have dusted the room a little bit—it hadn’t been used in the almost four months since he and Darren had come to live here. Chris supposed they would just have to worry about that tomorrow.

The giant paper sheet with their rules on it stared back at them from above the bed. __

_3) No sleeping on our shared bed until we’re both ready to spend the night together._

They were going to spend the night together. 

“Do you have a side you prefer?” Darren asked, snapping Chris out of his thoughts. 

“Not… really?” he answered. “It’s always been just me on my bed.”

“How about we just take a side tonight,” Darren suggested, “and if we don’t like it, we can switch tomorrow?”

Oh, god. Oh, _god,_ they were going to start sleeping on the same bed _every single night._

Chris took a deep breath before he started hyperventilating. He was ready for this. He _wanted_ to do this, which was the most important thing. Besides, he knew that if at any point he felt the slightest discomfort, he could tell Darren and they would talk it over and reach a compromise, just like they had done with everything so far. He had nothing to be afraid of. 

“Sounds good to me,” Chris said. 

It was like they didn’t even need to discuss this any further; each of them went to one side of the bed, with Chris taking the right one and Darren taking the left one. They both lay down on their sides, their backs facing each other without any physical contact between them—that was a conversation for another time, when Chris’ nerves weren’t standing on edge just because he was separated from Darren by mere inches. The only noise in the room was that of their breathings, syncing almost to the point of sounding like they were one and the same. 

“Do you…” Darren’s voice was so loud in this silence, despite the fact that he was whispering. “Do you want to shift our daily talking hour to… to this time? To when we go to bed?”

“I know this is going to sound stupid,” Chris said, and his own voice wasn’t any quieter, “but this is overwhelming enough as it is.” 

“Okay,” was Darren’s only reply. 

Perhaps next week, or in a few days, or even tomorrow, they could sit down and discuss the possibility of switching their daily talking hour to when they went to bed, when they were dressed in the minimum of layers and they were both closer yet more vulnerable with each other. But not now—not now, when hearing Darren speaking behind him was enough to nearly give Chris a panic attack. 

He could do this. He could spend the night knowing his soul mate was okay and happy and _alive_ behind him. He could sleep with the knowledge that his soul mate actually existed, that they’d found each other and now they were trying to make their relationship work. 

Everything was going to be okay. 

Chris fell asleep more easily than he had in the past four months. 

*

“Alright,” Jen said, the voice of a woman who was annoyed and wasn’t afraid to let the world know. “It was cute at first, but now it’s just weird.”

The library had been mostly empty for the last two hours, so Chris had started talking to Darren through their skin-marks. They’d begun chatting through their left arms, but Chris had run out of space and he’d had to recur to writing on his legs, up to his knees. 

(Because Darren might have no problem writing on his thigh, but Chris was working, he was in a _library,_ he couldn’t simply pull his pant leg up to his thigh! 

_You CAN, but that might be inappropriate,_ Darren had written.

 _You know perfectly well that was exactly what I meant,_ Chris had replied.

 _Then you might want to be a bit more specific next time, CHRIS)_.

Now he was almost done with his right leg, and soon he would have to switch over to his left leg. 

“I thought you said it was cute?” Chris asked her, reading Darren tell him about this bird he’d seen out in their lawn. The last thing he had written was, _I think we should have a birdhouse or something. Poor fella looked like he needed a place to rest!_

“At first!” Jen repeated. “I mean, damn it, Chris! This is starting to really freak me out. Can’t you guys use your phones?”

“Darren doesn’t use his phone,” Chris said, which was mostly true. The only times Chris had seen Darren use his phone had been because his brother insisted on calling him twice every week. Apparently his mother liked hearing about the progress he’d made on his album, but she didn’t want to call him and bother him herself, so she had his brother do it for her. Darren always took the chance to ask Chuck about his band, and Chris felt horrible for forgetting what their name was every single time Darren mentioned it to him. 

“Then why does he have one in the first place?”

“Ask him, not me.”

“UGH!” Jen growled, leaving Chris to his weird ways of communicating. “You’re driving me insane, Christopher!” she called out as she walked away from him, making herself useful near the children’s books section. 

Truthfully, Chris actually found it easier to talk to Darren like this. Not only because he rarely touched his cell phone other than to answer his brother’s calls, but because this was a system that worked for both of them. With text messages, you had to wait until the person you were talking to was finished writing—you couldn’t see what they were typing as they typed it unless you were next to them. With their skin-marks, on the other hand, if Darren was in the middle of writing something and Chris wanted to interrupt him, he could draw a parenthesis sign and Darren would immediately see it. 

Besides, he liked the fact that this was something that belonged only to them, that was his and Darren’s only. They could text and talk to anyone else they wanted to talk to, but when it was just the two of them, they had something else—something that pulled them away from the rest of the world but brought them closer at the same time. 

And Chris liked that. He really, really did. 

*

Sleeping in their shared bedroom had become the norm. Though it had only been a few days, Chris couldn’t even think about going back to his room to sleep. Sure, they still slept with their backs to each other, but Chris hadn’t hyperventilated or had a panic attack yet, so he counted that as progress. With each passing night, he actually felt more comfortable sharing the bed with Darren. 

They hadn’t discussed Darren’s idea of switching their daily talking hour to when they went to sleep, and perhaps it was time for them to do so. 

“So, I was thinking,” Chris told Darren as they made the bed. This had become another ritual of sorts, another unspoken agreement between them—to make the bed every night, after they’d had dinner and changed into their pajamas. 

“That’s always dangerous,” Darren said, and Chris narrowed his eyes at him. 

“I was thinking,” he repeated, “that shifting our daily talking hour to _this_ hour doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.”

Darren patted the sheets on his side of the bed. “But,” he said, lifting his head to look at Chris, “we already had our daily talking hour today.”

“Well, then this can be tomorrow’s,” Chris said, only half-joking. “Or we can just start doing this tomorrow, if you’d prefer—”

“No, no, that’s—that’s great!” Darren exclaimed. “Hey, I’m getting another hour of talking to you, I’m not complaining.”

Chris huffed out a chuckle, but there was a blush rising on his cheeks, probably going all the way up to his ears, if the heat he felt on his head was any indication. Darren was kind enough not to mention it. 

They had always been back to back when they lay down on their bed, so the sudden change in perspective was enough to make Chris feel like his heart had stopped beating for a few seconds. He had never been so close to Darren, had never had him up-close like this, where he could almost count every single one of Darren’s eyelashes—god, he had such _long_ eyelashes—and see the speckles of different shades of brown in his eyes, the hazel and the honey and the darker browns in the eyes he suddenly felt enamored with. He couldn’t stop staring at them. He wanted to reach out and touch Darren’s face, just slightly, with the pads of his fingers, just to make sure that this wasn’t a hallucination—just to make sure that Darren was corporeal and real in front of him. 

He would have actually done it if Darren hadn’t smiled and exhaled loudly through his nose, his breathing covering Chris’ face, they were _so close._

“I…” Darren licked his lips. “For some reason, I can’t remember any single thing I wanted to ask you.”

Chris smiled, feeling a grin start to quirk up the corners of his mouth. “It’s okay,” he said. “I can wait for you to remember.”

He never would’ve thought he would be comfortable simply staring at his soul mate, listening to his breathing, learning the rhythm with which his chest rose and fell—but he was. It was a tranquility he had never felt before, it was calmness in the shape of hazel eyes and long eyelashes and black curls and a smile that seemed to bring him home. 

“I literally forgot what I was gonna say,” Darren whispered, and his words were like a sign to Chris, as if they were beckoning him to do something he should’ve done a long time. 

“Remember when you asked me,” he started, his voice as small and soft as Darren’s had been, “when was the first time any of your handwriting showed up on my arm?” Darren nodded, his hands between his head and his pillow. Chris mirrored his pose, as if that would make this easier for him. “I was thirteen, around the same time I realized I was gay. It was a flower, a yellow circle with petals of different colors around it and a green leaf underneath it. I knew I hadn’t drawn it—it was my first soul-mark, and I was so excited to finally see it! I ran off to find a pen and wrote a question on my arm: _are you really there?_ ”

Darren frowned, and Chris suddenly wanted to kiss the furrowed space between his eyebrows. He didn’t ever want to see Darren frown or look upset in any way. 

“I never saw—”

“I know,” Chris continued. “The question vanished as soon as I finished writing it—it was like someone had wiped the words clean off my arm. Then I tried with another question: _what’s your name?_ The same thing happened, and so I stopped trying. I didn’t tell anyone about it until I knew what was going on, so I began doing some research on skin-marks. But there was nothing on the kind of skin-mark I’d seen, and no one anywhere had any answers, but I still saw the flowers and the musical notes and the smiley faces you drew. At first I thought I’d only had to wait, and I dared to try writing on my own arm again: _I don’t know if this is working._ But I didn’t mind yet, I didn’t mind having no way of communicating with you because at least I knew you were out there somewhere, brightening my days with your random pictures.”

Darren smiled kindly, though Chris saw his eyes fill with something resembling sadness. He held out one of his hands in the space between them, palm up, and Darren immediately covered it with one of his, palm down. Their fingers curled towards each other, slightly interlacing despite not being a perfect fit. Chris didn’t care about it—he had never looked for perfection. 

“Then, for an entire year,” Chris said, feeling how his throat closed at the mere thought of the words he was going to speak next. He swallowed and glanced down at his fingers entwined with Darren’s, focusing on his touch to keep him grounded. “F-for an entire year, I didn’t see anything. There were no drawings, no words, no skin-marks of any kind, and I lost it. I thought I’d been imagining everything that had popped up on my arm, that I’d never had any soul-mark, that it had all stemmed from my desperation to finally show everyone that I wasn’t a freak, that I was like them, that I wasn’t somehow made _wrong_.”

There were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t reach up to wipe them away as they made their way down to the bridge of his nose, falling onto the sheets beneath them. He was glad Darren didn’t do it for him—if he did, he would have to let go of Chris’ hand, and Chris didn’t know if he would be able to go on without the support of Darren’s hand tightly pressed to his own. 

“A-and,” he stammered, his voice wobbling below his tears, “i-it’s so obvious to me now, why you never saw the questions I asked you, the words I wanted to say to you—because it couldn’t be so easy, humans weren’t given soul-marks as an easy way out, but I was too young and too foolish and too _scared_ to figure that out, I wanted answers and I couldn’t wait for them like I should’ve. Even after your handwriting showed up on my arm again, I was tired, I was done having hope, and so I knew I had a soul mate but I no longer cared about finding them, I was sure I would _never_ find them, it was just my luck that I’d have this fucking soul-mark no one knew _anything_ about…”

He was trembling now, his entire body shaking under the weight of his own stupidity, of his lack of trust, of _faith_ in himself and in the person he would spend the rest of his life loving and caring for. The tears came faster, blurring his vision and blocking his nose, and then Chris was crying, sobbing like he could purge all of the pain and the anger and the desperation and frustration and the _hurt_ that had hollowed his body for the past ten years, that had left him the shell of a boy who’d found only wonder in the concept of soul mates until it was easier to give up on it than to keep believing. 

“If I’d just known, if I’d just been smarter, if I hadn’t been so _terrified_ ,” he cried, his sentences breaking apart whenever he gasped for air, “I would’ve tried, I would’ve kept trying, but I gave up—I’m sorry, I gave up on me, on _you_ , god, Darren, I gave up on you such a long time before I even _met_ you, I gave up on _us_ without ever giving us a chance, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, _I’m so sorry_ —”

Darren was now crying, too, but that didn’t stop him from pulling Chris into his arms so tightly, it hurt him to breathe. Chris held onto him for dear life, muffling his sobs against Darren’s shoulder, and Darren just hugged him tighter, as if his embrace could make all of his fears and insecurities go away, as if the tighter his arms were around him, the more pieces of Chris would come back together. 

The shaky breaths Chris took felt as though he was breathing out all the demons he’d carried within himself, and breathing in all the care and affection Darren had to give him. 

*

When Chris woke up the next morning, his head was pounding, his eyes were puffy, and Darren was offering him a glass of water.

“Morning,” he said. He sat cross-legged on his side of the bed, and Chris managed to lift himself off the bed and lean halfway back against the wall. 

“Morning,” he replied, taking the glass of water and nearly chugging it down. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” 

The events of the previous night came flooding back to Chris’ memory, and he realized that he wasn’t even all that embarrassed about his little breakdown. He would’ve had to let it all out eventually; he was just glad he’d done it when he and Darren were already in pretty good terms with each other. 

“How do you feel?” Darren asked him, placing a careful hand on his shoulder.

“Better, actually,” Chris answered. “You? I mean, that was—that was a pretty big bomb I dropped on you, huh?”

“No, no, I mean…” Darren scooted back on the bed so that he was also leaning against the wall. “It _was_ pretty big, but I’m glad you got it off your chest. It—makes me really happy that you trust me enough to have told me that, thank you.”

“On the contrary,” Chris said, finishing the last of his water. “Thank _you_ for listening to me.”

For a moment, neither of them said anything. Chris knew he should leave the room and start getting ready for the day, but he couldn’t muster enough strength to move. He was still tired from last night, and he believed his legs would fail him as soon as he tried to stand up. Besides, he had the feeling that Darren wanted to say something. So he gave him the time he needed to find the right words. 

After a few seconds, Chris’ theory was proven right. 

“You know,” Darren began, looking down at his lap. “I always thought the day I found my soul mate would be the best day of my life. Even better than my wedding day.”

Chris couldn’t help wincing as he remembered what an ass he’d been that day; god, he hadn’t even wanted to talk to Darren, to be in the same proximity as him, much less make any kind of contact with him.

“I’m really sorry—”

Darren’s hand reached out to grasp Chris’. It was funny how touchy-feely they had been lately, and Chris made a mental note to ask Darren if they should just scratch out their first rule. What did it matter now, when they held hands while talking in the morning and embraced as if that was the answer to the secrets of the universe? 

“To be honest,” Darren interrupted him, “I—I didn’t feel anything for you that day, just like you didn’t feel anything for me. And the day we had that argument, when we both just snapped at each other, you said you’d never felt any kind of love towards me, and it made me realize that I hadn’t, either. That devastated me, you know, it—it _crushed_ me, because I didn’t know what we were gonna do if there was no love between us whatsoever.”

He didn’t say it, but Chris could read it in his eyes: that was probably the reason true love’s kiss hadn’t worked with them. 

“I’ve gotta confess something,” Darren continued. “My decision to try to make things work between us was greatly driven by stubbornness.”

“You _are_ pretty stubborn,” Chris said, earning a laugh from Darren. Damn, he really liked hearing that sound. Darren’s smile, his grin, his chuckles, his laughter… They were all sounds Chris wanted to spend the rest of his life listening to. He hoped he always found a way to bring them out of Darren. 

“But it was mostly driven by the fact that I genuinely wanted to get to know and love you,” he said, and he raised his head to meet Chris’ eyes. Now that he had seen those eyes up close, Chris actually wanted to start counting each and every single one of Darren’s eyelashes. “So I guess… I just wanna say thank you,” Darren told him, “for coming back that night.” 

It hadn’t been an easy decision. Chris had almost given up that night, too—he had almost walked out of Darren’s life as easily as he had walked into it, but Darren’s stubbornness had paid off in the end. Now he couldn’t imagine where he’d be now, if he had made the wrong choice back then; he didn’t even want to think about it. 

Chris finally stood up from the bed, and he made his way towards the door to get ready for another day at the library. Before he was out of the room, he came to a halt on the doorway. 

“So, how’s the whole ‘getting to know and love me’ thing working out for you?”

It had surely been more difficult than Darren could have ever thought. Chris wasn’t an easy person to get along with, or to care for, for that matter. But Darren had still found the way, and the smile he gave Chris told him he didn’t regret it. Not even a tiny bit. 

“It’s a work in progress,” he said. 

*

“Can I tell you a secret?” Darren murmured, though his voice kept getting lost between his yawns. Were those his yawns, or where they Chris’? 

“Sure thing,” Chris said—oh, wait, those were definitely his yawns. He was having such a hard time keeping his eyes open. 

“Sometimes I feel like I’ve known you for a long time, instead of the five months we’ve lived together.”

With every last bit of strength he could muster, Chris opened his eyes and stared straight into Darren’s. 

“You know,” he whispered. “Sometimes, I feel the same way.”

It wasn’t just because there were times when they seemed to read each other’s mind, finishing the other one’s sentences or saying something the other one was going to say. It was the way they moved around each other, as if they had spent years being in the same place, used to the other one always being around. It was the way Darren talked to his brother about Chris instead of telling him about his album, like he had worked years to find out so much about him and he had to share it with whoever was willing to listen. It was the way Chris talked to his co-workers about Darren, like they were old friends who had decided to live together just because they were already together most of the time, why not save on expenses and move into the same house?

It was the way he woke up some mornings and, despite how against this he had been in the beginning, the first thought to cross his mind was, _I can’t believe I finally found you._

“Do you believe in past lives?” Darren questioned, and with every word he said, his voice sounded farther and farther away. Was he falling asleep, like Chris was?

“Do you?” Chris replied.

“Why not?” Darren answered. “The universe is so much bigger than we think. It’s been alive such a long time, Chris. Who’s to say we’re not reincarnations of people who lived before our great-grandparents were born?” 

“Okay,” Chris said, burying his head further down into his pillow. “Let’s say we’ve had a few past lives.”

“I wonder if we had the same kind of soul-mark as we do now.”

“Our strange, possibly unstable skin-writing soul-mark? I don’t think so.”

Darren giggled, and it was so weird to hear him make that sound. Chris had never heard him giggle before. He wanted to hear Darren giggle again and again and again and…

“I’ll give you that,” Darren said.

“I wonder if we found each other sooner in any of our past lives,” Chris mumbled, his eyes falling closed against his will. 

He could feel Darren’s breath ghosting over his face. “I hope so.”

*

“How’s your book so far?”

“Pretty good. I think the doctor’s slowly going insane, though he doesn’t seem to have noticed. Or maybe he _has_ noticed, and he’s just in denial. I guess I’ll find out on the next chapter.”

“Cool. I hope everything turns out okay for him in the end.”

“Thanks. Anything interesting happened on your show yet?”

“Not yet. Then again, it’s only starting. I think that girl’s gonna come across a corpse or something, or maybe _she_ is the victim. It’s always one or the other with these cop shows.”

“Tell me if this girl is one or the other, okay?”

“Will do.”

They were both sitting on the L-shaped couch in the living room, even if they were both doing something different: Chris was reading on the corner of the couch, leaning back against it with his knees pulled into his chest; Darren, on the other hand, was watching TV with his legs crossed underneath him. It was curious how at ease they had been around each other lately, spending most of their time in the same room despite performing different activities. Two months ago, Chris would’ve had some reservations about reading while Darren watched TV at the same time, but today they had both been in the living room for the past three hours with no problems at all. Darren asked Chris the occasional question about his book, Chris asked Darren the occasional question about whatever show he’d tuned in to… 

He couldn’t believe they had come so far. 

Then again, they had lived together for nearly seven months now. 

Chris glanced over at Darren, who was too enthralled on the cop show he was watching to notice. Most of their progress had been achieved because Darren had made the first move—he’d been the one who had wanted to talk to Chris about their relationship, he’d been the one who had talked to him through their soul-marks that same night, he’d been the one to suggest spending time together in his room… 

Sure, Chris had made some first moves on his own, but that had only been after gaining the courage he needed from Darren, from watching him take their relationship forward one step at a time. If they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, there should be more balance between them. Chris had to do a first move on his own. 

He put his book down and scooted closer to Darren until he was sitting on his knees next to him. Darren finally noticed Chris had moved from the corner of the couch, and he turned his head to him with a smile. He was so beautiful in every single way Chris could think of—had Darren always been this beautiful and he had only realized that _now?_

“What?” Darren asked. 

Chris leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. 

It wasn’t a movie kiss, with a romantic score in the background and camera shots of different people rejoicing at the resolution of the main couple’s sexual tension. It wasn’t anything fancy, really, it was just… a kiss—a soft one at that, their lips pressed together without too much force behind them but with enough to be a proper kiss. Chris felt like he was losing his balance, like he might fall on top of Darren, so he lightly cupped his jaw in his hands, holding Darren as though he might break if Chris wasn’t careful enough. Darren had turned his body slightly towards Chris, his hand firm on his knee, like the first time they had talked on this exact same spot on the couch. His ridiculously long eyelashes brushed Chris’ cheeks, and suddenly both of his hands were holding onto Chris’ knees and Chris held Darren a little tighter and they both pulled each other closer somehow. 

Chris could hear Darren breathing, he could _feel_ it against his face, against his skin, in his bones, in his blood, in his _soul_ —as if they were two parts of a greater creation, as if the two of them were already whole, yet together, they made up another being, consisting of the sum of all of their parts. He didn’t hear the birds outside chirping in sync to the beat of his heart, but he… he suddenly felt like everything was right in the world. He felt like a missing part of himself had finally— _at last_ —found its place within him.

When Chris broke away, his hands still holding Darren’s jaw, Darren’s lips were parted, only slightly, and it took him a few seconds to open his eyes and meet Chris’ gaze. 

This wasn’t the solution Darren had originally thought it would be. This wasn’t the answer to all of the problems they’d had before, to the problems they had now that hadn’t come up so far for one reason or another, but… but Chris still liked it. It was… nice. 

Darren grinned that beaming sunrise smile of his, and though Chris’ smile was a little pale in comparison, he offered one in return nonetheless. He sat down next to Darren, picking his book back up from where he’d left it and pulling his knees back into his chest to continue his reading. The doctor was slowly going insane, after all. Darren remained with his body slightly turned towards Chris, but he leaned back on the couch as much as he could in his strange position and returned his gaze to the show on the TV. 

On the next commercial break, Chris heard Darren say, “So, how did the whole ‘no kissing unless Chris initiates it’ rule work out for you?” 

Chris smacked Darren’s arm with his book, not knowing whether to yell or laugh along Darren’s own laughter. He kind of wanted to remind Darren that rule had been _his_ idea, he had no place to complain about it! In the end, he did none of those things, choosing instead to keep reading with his head against his soul mate’s arm. 

He thought Darren would say something about this non-discussed physical contact, but that rule had honestly been thrown out the window a long time ago without actually having to scratch it off the giant paper sheet above their bed. 

“Turns out,” Darren said, his eyes back on the TV, “the girl at the beginning of the show _was_ the victim.” 

*

Chris had to agree with Darren—kissing was _great._

It had become something regular in their home, sharing tiny soft kisses that Chris always initiated, as stated by their fourth rule. At first he had asked Darren if he was okay with Chris kissing him whenever he wanted, and he was genuinely surprised when Darren told him, “I said I wasn’t gonna stop you, remember?”

“Yes, I know that, but consent is important, and I don’t want—” 

“Chris,” Darren had interrupted him. “If I ever change my mind, even for just _one_ kiss, I’ll let you know.”

Which, thankfully, hadn’t happened up to now. Of course, if Darren ever said no, Chris would immediately back off, but until he crossed that bridge, the best part of Chris’ day was kissing Darren, and he tried to do it as many times as he could. 

Though, now that he thought about it, he should’ve tried to do it even more times today.

“I don’t think kissing you in front of my parents is such a good idea,” Chris said with a woeful sigh as he and Darren made their way to the Colfer household after having taken a taxi from the bus station. Coming back to his old house in Clovis was something Chris wished he never had to do, but it was all worth it to introduce Darren to his family. Besides, he had decided this trip would not bring him down even a peg—he had gotten out of this hellhole, he had found his soul mate, and now they were happily living together, putting their best into making their relationship work every single day. If anything, Chris was going to walk around with his head held high. 

Next to him, he felt Darren tense, his fingers tightening around the box with the cake they’d baked together for the occasion. 

“Like they need any other reason to dislike me,” he said. “They’ll probably think I’m deflowering their son or something!”

“Can you _please_ not use that word in front of my family?” Chris asked, interlacing his arm through Darren’s. “Better yet, can you please not use that word _at all_?”

“Too out there, huh?” Darren agreed. “What do you think about ‘dishonoring’?”

“I think,” Chris chuckled, “that you shouldn’t be so nervous. My parents are going to love you, I promise. I’m sure they’ll like you more than they like me.”

“Okay, now that is just a whole lot of crap,” Darren said, and Chris was glad to see the tension leave his shoulders. “They’re _your_ parents! It’s like saying my parents will like you more than they like me.”

“Well, I haven’t met them yet.” That would be in two weeks, because Mr. and Mrs. Criss were out of town at the moment. “What makes you think they won’t?” Darren narrowed his eyes at him.

“Oh, you’re quickly getting on my bad side, Christopher!”

“Oh, please, as if _you_ have a bad side.”

“How do you know I don’t?” Darren demanded, looking almost offended. 

“Because I’ve lived with you for eight months, Dare,” Chris said, patting Darren’s arm. “That’s how.”

Chris’ parents immediately proved to Darren they had liked him for a long time now, and actually meeting him in person only made them like him even more (the cake certainly helped—vanilla bread with strawberries on top, both his mother’s and his sister’s favorite. That was why Chris had told Darren to carry it).

He and Chris sat next to each other at the dining table. They only had four chairs, and Darren had offered to take the stool Chris’ dad had brought out from the kitchen, but Mr. Colfer refused to let him. 

“You’re our guest of honor here, Darren!” Chris’ father told him. “You’re our son’s soul mate! How could we let you sit on a dang stool?” 

“Curse words aren’t allowed in the house,” Hannah said from her place on one end of the table. Her dad took the head of the table, carrying his stool so he could sit on it. 

“Wow, uh, thank you, sir!” Darren said. He and Chris accommodated their chairs right next to each other, facing across from Mrs. Colfer. 

“So, Darren,” Chris’ mother said. “Chris says he was in the Starbucks where you guys met because his coffee machine broke down.”

“Yep,” Chris grumbled. He had _really_ hoped his parents wouldn’t bring that up; it only made him feel guilty now that his sole reason for being at the same place as his soul mate was a broken coffee machine. Darren bumped their shoulders together. 

“But he’s never told us why _you_ were there,” his mom went on. “Any reason in particular?”

Chris turned his head towards Darren. Come to think of it, he had never asked Darren why he was at the Starbucks. It seemed a little ridiculous to ask if he had a reason—maybe he just liked the coffee there. 

“Um…” Darren cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I was actually supposed to visit my brother in San Francisco. He’s got a band and it was the first time they’d gotten together in a really long time, and I grew up around all of them, they were all like, my older brothers. So I should’ve been on a plane to San Fran, but I overslept and lost my flight. The friend who drove me to the airport told me we could go get coffee, and I said, sure, why not? And then, half an hour later,” he said, glancing over at Chris, “ _this_ guy walks in and…”

Darren was staring at him with such loving eyes that Chris had to turn away, but he was blushing and smiling around his food, anyway.

“And the rest is history,” Darren finished. 

Hannah didn’t seem to be that impressed over the story, but Chris’ parents looked like they were going to cry. 

“Oh, it was _definitely_ meant to be!” his father said, his hand tightly gripping his wife’s. 

“We’re so happy you boys finally found each other!” his mother cried, wiping a tear from her eye. “Our Chris was so lonely here.”

“He was really sad, too,” said his sister.

“ _Hannah_ —” Chris groaned.

“What? It’s the truth.”

“And we can just see how happy you make him!” Mrs. Colfer continued, clapping her hands together. Well, that, at least, was also true. “So we just want to thank you, Darren, for loving our boy!” 

Chris nearly spilled his orange soda through his nose (his mother was whole-heartedly against _Diet Coke_ ), and he heard Darren almost choking on his food. While the sentiment was seriously appreciated, “love” was a strong word to use when it came to Chris and Darren. They… they cared about each other, obviously, and these past eight months, they had only grown closer, but… but to say they _loved_ each other…

“Did I—” Chris’ mom stared at his dad. “Did I say something wrong?”

“N-no, not at all!” Darren exclaimed at the same time Chris blew his nose on another napkin, just to be sure. “But I should be the one to thank _you_ , Mrs. Colfer, ‘cause this dinner is delightful!”

Chris sighed deeply, mumbling a _Thank you_ to Darren, because his parents immediately moved on with the dinner talk. They asked Darren questions Chris already knew the answer to— _So you have an older brother? You grew up in San Francisco?_ —but he still answered them with a genuine smile and an honest kindness behind his every word. Chris watched him engage Hannah in a conversation when he noticed she’d been quiet for a long time, and Chris had never heard his sister talk so much with someone she had just met. 

If Darren was like this with Chris’ family, Chris couldn’t wait to have dinner with Darren’s. They must be just like him: gentle and caring and loving and nice and _joyous._

He remembered the night he and Darren had talked about the possibility of past lives, when Chris wondered if they had found each other sooner in any of theirs. What if they had? What if they had met as children and only realized they were soul mates until they were much older? God, Chris would’ve loved to have met Darren when he was a kid, because he knew with absolute certainty that Darren would have become his best friend because that was just the kind of person he was—he was someone who loved with everything he had, who had cared for Chris after knowing him for a few hours, who always made sure Chris was comfortable with their relationship, he was the one who had helped Chris cast his own demons away, who had helped him believe that maybe the universe _wasn’t_ wrong about them, that maybe they _were_ soul mates and they’d just needed a little push to realize it, he was a wonderful human being and Chris loved him so much—

Chris loved him. He loved Darren. 

He didn’t only love him, he was _in love_ with him.

He was in love with Darren. 

Darren was still talking to Hannah, to his parents, he was smiling and laughing and answering their every question and Chris was in love with him.

Now Chris was the one who felt like crying. He swallowed through the unshed tears behind his eyes and took a sip from his glass of orange soda. 

_Like I was already in love,_ the boy had said after finding his soul mate, in the reunion Chris had witnessed when he was twelve.

He was in love with Darren. 

All of a sudden, he felt like he could breathe a little more easily. 

*

It had been years since Chris had laughed this hard, but he couldn’t help it. 

“That’s _obviously_ not a green screen,” Darren kept saying in every scene with an obviously fake background in the movie they were watching—an old action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis as an ex-federal agent and his wife, or something along those lines—and it was funnier every time he did. Chris was holding his stomach, leaning against Darren in the middle of the couch as he wiped tears of laughter off his eyes.

“How come the driver gets shot and his foot presses harder down on the accelerator?” Darren asked, and Chris felt like he was going to suffocate, he couldn’t stop laughing. 

“’Cause it w-wouldn’t be fun if the car suddenly came to a stop in the middle of a high-speed chase, Dare!” Chris explained, gasping to catch his breath. 

“Yeah,” Darren said with a laugh of his own. “I guess that makes sense.” 

“Okay, okay, hang on a second,” Chris said after a few more scenes. “You mean to tell me that Jamie Lee Curtis knocked out this woman for like, five minutes? And then the woman wakes up just in time to watch her demise approaching?”

“She’s one of the bad guys, Chris!” Darren said. “It’s divine justice!”

“No, I know, but _why_ couldn’t they kill her off while she was still knocked out?” Chris wondered. A tiny chuckle bubbled past his lips. “It just seems too cruel, if you ask me.”

“Technically, she didn’t just have the time to watch her demise approaching,” Darren argued. “She had enough time to wake up, see the abyss she was heading into, realize it was her demise approaching, and face it with dignity and an _oh, shit._ ”

Chris burst into renewed laughter, feeling like his lungs were going to explode out of his chest. If Darren hadn’t been sitting next to him, already supporting half of his weight, he would’ve flopped down onto the couch, kicking his legs into the air. 

“Oh, god,” he gasped, trying to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth, “I love you.”

He was suddenly able to stop laughing. 

Time froze for about thirty seconds. Chris didn’t make a sound, and neither did Darren. Even the movie on TV seemed to have come to a halt, or maybe Chris had just stopped paying it any of his attention. He felt Darren lean slightly away from him, enough so that Chris had to sit up straight so as not to fall over. He was staring ahead at the TV, but he still felt Darren’s eyes on him, watching him intently. 

“You love me?” Darren asked, his voice barely above a whisper. 

This was _so_ not the moment Chris wanted to say that, he had wanted to say it after one of their nightly talking hours, when they were so tired and spent that he let it slip without having to worry too much about it, when he could say it after kissing Darren, when he was staring straight into Darren’s honey-colored eyes as the words left the tip of his tongue—not during a stupid action movie they had been making fun of since it had started, not while he was leaning against Darren, trying to catch his breath because Darren kept making him laugh with his ridiculous comments and his perfectly delivered jokes. 

Chris was mortified, he was so embarrassed, he wanted to _die_. 

“Yeah?” he said, complete with a wobbling end to his sentence to make it sound like a question. 

Time froze for another thirty seconds, and Chris didn’t know if his heart had frozen, too, or if he was simply holding his breath, awaiting Darren’s response—whatever it was.

The response he got was Darren sighing in what could only be… relief?

“Oh, thank _god_.” 

Chris finally allowed himself to look at Darren, whose eyes were glistening with what seemed to be unshed tears. He was smiling so widely that his beaming sunrise smile couldn’t ever compare to it—this was an entirely different smile, a smile that sang all the right notes to reach Chris’ soul, to lovingly wrap around it and _tug_ at it, like the magnetic pull Chris had felt towards his soul mate the day they had met. 

Oh, how Chris longed to feel that magnetic pull towards Darren for the rest of his life. 

“’Cause I was afraid of telling you that I love you and that you’d freak out on me or something,” Darren said. 

There it was—that tug again. Chris was hyper-aware of the beating of his heart, of it pounding inside his chest, and he wondered if it was possible for it to simply burst out of him. 

Now Chris asked him, “You love me?”

“Yeah,” Darren answered, and a slight blush overtook his cheeks. He was so adorable, so gorgeous, so _beautiful_. “Probably have since we first spent the day in your room, but I think I knew when you kissed me for the first time.”

Chris didn’t know what to say. He was in shock, and the only thought running across his mind was how he could’ve ever doubted Darren the way he did, how he could’ve given up on finding him after a few failed attempts. But the galaxy or the universe or whatever unexplainable force drew soul mates together had never lost its faith on him, even when he had—it had taken him into its arms, turned him around, and pushed him towards Darren. 

Towards the love of his life. Towards his soul mate.

He couldn’t believe how lucky he was. 

“To be honest,” Darren said, bringing Chris back down to the earth, “I thought you were gonna make some kind of joke about being a great kisser.” 

“I’m…” Chris licked his lips. “I’m still processing this recent information.” Darren raised an eyebrow in surprise. 

“Christopher Paul Colfer,” he said, slowly drawing out each word, and that never failed to make Chris’ entire body shudder. “Are you actually admitting I left you speechless?”

Chris turned away with an indignant scoff, as if that could fool Darren after eight months of living together. He had already seen the smile Chris was trying to hide, the same way he had at the city hall, such a long time ago. Chris found himself tackled onto the couch, Darren’s arms wrapped around him, and his embrace didn’t feel like it was bringing all of his pieces together anymore.

It felt like it was welcoming him home. 

Darren pulled away, his hands on either side of Chris’ face, holding himself on top of him. “I know the rule says only you can initiate it,” he said, and his eyes were sparkling, “but I _really_ wanna kiss you right now.”

“Eh,” Chris said with a shrug of his shoulders and a smug smirk. “It’s about time we go over the rules, anyway.” 

He was smiling when Darren leaned down to kiss him. 

*

Redecorating their bedroom was turning out to be harder than Chris had originally thought. 

“We are _not_ bringing your giant table into our room, Darren,” he told Darren for what felt like the millionth time.

“ _Why not?_ ” Darren whined—he _whined_. 

“Because we don’t have the space!” 

“Sure we do, this room is bigger than our individual rooms!”

“We already have two bedside tables here!” 

“We can always use another table!”

Chris pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, how about we bring in one of the desks?”

“Just one of them?”

“What, you want to bring in _both_ of them?”

“I’m just saying—” Darren held his hands in the air. “—that we could always use another table. Or, another smooth surface to lean on, I guess.” 

Chris turned around in their room. They had decided to take down their rules, just because they were pretty useless at this point. Chris knew Darren hadn’t thrown the giant paper sheet out, opting to keep it in one of the bedside tables of his own room, but he didn’t mind. They had also painted the walls different colors, so they had a blue wall, a red one, a green one, and a purple one, in honor of the markers Chris had picked for Darren to write their rules with. The ceiling, like the two lines on which they’d signed their official document, was painted orange. 

They had considered moving their bed to the red wall, to have more space to work with, but then whoever slept on the side of the wall would have to climb over the other one to get out of bed, and Chris didn’t want to accidentally kick Darren in the face or slam his head against the ground after tripping with him. So the queen-sized bed remained in the middle of the room with its head against the blue wall, the two bedside tables still on either side of it.

Chris had helped Darren install the two metal bars on the wall where the door was (the purple one, between the blue and the green ones) to hang his guitar, and Darren had helped Chris install some shelves on the opposite wall (the red one) so that he could put some of his books there. Darren’s pink worn beanbag chair lay on one of the corners of the room.

“Okay,” Chris said, facing the empty green wall, his back to the bed. “We can bring both desks in and put them here, if that’ll make you happy.”

“That would make me _very_ happy, Chris,” Darren said, wrapping his arms around Chris’ waist from behind and kissing his cheek. 

“Alright, mister, put your kissy lips away.” Darren pressed another kiss to his cheek, and he leaned his chin on Chris’ shoulder. Chris glanced around their room, remembering how different it had looked when they had first started living in this house; it had almost seemed too big, too vacant, and Chris had thought he’d never feel comfortable being in it. Now this was where he and Darren spent most of their time when they weren’t watching TV downstairs. They even ate in their bedroom now, both of them sitting cross-legged on the bed as they enjoyed their meals together. Their individual rooms would serve their original purpose, which was to give them some space away from each other if they ever had an argument, and Chris and Darren would each get dressed in their own rooms, since their shared one didn’t include a closet. 

Chris thought back to his childhood home, to the house he had grown up in; it was entirely different from this one, of course, it was a different city and his parents had been given that house in another time, but it had still been home to him. Even when he’d felt trapped and alone and scared, it had been the one place where he knew he was safe. 

He was suddenly reminded of the shelf in his parents’ living room, the one where they had kept the receipt of the book they had both reached for when they met. 

“Hey, Dare?” Chris called.

“Hm?” Darren’s eyes were closed, like he was about to fall asleep leaning on Chris like this, his chin on his shoulder and his arms around his waist. 

“Did your friend really delete the video of our first meeting?”

Darren turned his head so that his nose brushed the skin of Chris’ neck. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I honestly don’t think she did, even though I told her she could. Maybe she kept it, in case we changed our minds.” He pulled away from Chris just enough to lean his head against his back, his arms tightening around him. “Should I… tell her we still don’t want it?”

Chris turned around in Darren’s embrace and wrapped his own arms around Darren’s neck, leaning their foreheads together. “If she kept it,” he whispered, his lips brushing Darren’s, “do you think she could give us a copy to keep as our memento?”

Darren smiled against his mouth. “You want it to be our memento?”

“Yeah,” Chris answered, but he knew he couldn’t take such a decision by himself. “Do you?”

“I… kinda considered the pen I used that day as a memento,” Darren admitted, blushing. “You know, my favorite pen?”

“Your lucky pen,” Chris recalled, nodding his head. 

“But a copy of the video is better,” Darren said, shrugging his shoulders. Oh, it was so cute when he tried to pretend something wasn’t a big deal. 

Chris softly pressed their lips together, swallowing Darren’s fear and worry, casting them away, trying to convey through his mouth that Darren didn’t have to push his own wishes aside just to make room for Chris’—he didn’t have to put Chris’ happiness before his own. They could both be happy without having to sacrifice themselves. They could both have their wishes come true, if they wanted. 

They could both have everything in the world, if they wanted. 

“We can keep both a copy of the video and your lucky pen,” Chris whispered once they’d broken apart. “We can put them on a shelf above your two desks, so that we can see them whenever we want.” 

“Oh, so now they’re _my_ two desks?” Darren asked, all tension and nervousness gone from his voice. 

“You’re the one who wants them here, sweetheart.”

“God, I love it when you call me cute things,” Darren said, and Chris kissed him again and again, mumbling ridiculously cheesy nicknames against Darren’s mouth with every breath he took, with every kiss he gave Darren, each one as precious as if it were their first. 

“I love _you_ ,” Chris said, unsure of where he ended and Darren began, not really caring about finding it out.

Darren grinned against his lips. “I love you, too,” he muttered, and those words were a song Chris wanted to hear until the day he died. “Tell me you love me again.”

“I love you,” Chris repeated, granting Darren’s wish. Darren had given him everything he wanted since the start of their relationship—he still did, anything Chris wanted—, and so Chris would spend the rest of his life making sure Darren’s wishes always came true as well, no matter how small they were. 

“Kiss me again.” 

And really, when such small, simple things brought Darren such happiness, how could Chris deny him?


End file.
